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Essays

So Long, Farewell!

This post brings some perhaps expected but nonetheless sad news. We’ve decided to shutter the [tk] review. The last two years have been a pleasure, but as the different editors’ lives (and especially careers) have taken different directions, we’ve found ourselves less capable of dedicating the appropriate amount of time  to this website. Below, we [...]

Welcome to the [tk] review

Founded in 2010 as [tk] reviews, the [tk] review attempts to reach a wide audience, incorporate a diverse set of contributors, and explore a broad field of inquiry—including fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and book reviews. So welcome and thanks: to fans of [tk] reviews for your patience and devotion; to new readers, for your willingness and interest.

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Reviews

“A poem is the cry of its occasion.” So says Wallace Stevens, an adage that quite succinctly captures the spirit of poetry since at least modernism, if not since its infancy in song. Such a heightened attention to the present is what readers today expect from great poets; and with lines like  “I saw the [...]

Essays

It is a universally acknowledged truth that writers are rarely who we imagine them to be. We take in a writer’s stories, their language, their carefully selected adjectives, and we assemble a portrait of the person who has captured our imagination…This romantic analysis, I imagine, is what happens for those of us who read one [...]

Essays

There’s no better way to officially mark a paradigm shift than to declare, in some sweeping, general way, the simple notion that things are changing. Many see self-publishing as a sort of runner-up to the grand prize. A way to settle should a publisher or agent not want to invest in a writer’s work. Admittedly, [...]

Essays

I should start by specifying that the experiment I set out to conduct here was undertaken in the spirit of genuine curiosity. Because, who knows? Maybe he does. It can’t be denied that the boy has a pretty face, and the aesthetically gifted have always been a tempting target for haters. In this case there [...]

Essays

I suspect that I am in good company when I say that I long put off reading Anna Karenina (Oxford University Press, $9.95) despite many trusted friends’ plugs of it. I didn’t think there would be much to relate to in a tragic, sweeping epic. It didn’t exactly seem like the kind of book you [...]

Reviews

Reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.00) is like walking through pristine woods: just when you begin to get lost in the beauty, you hear a strange noise, and you turn around, startled, with a sped-up heart, and take stock of the fact that the woods, while beautiful, are full of terrifying [...]

Reviews

There is something innately, and perhaps disconcertingly, satisfying in bearing witness to other people’s suffering. Not the Schadenfreude variety, like the cheer emitted upon seeing the Wicked Witch of the West dissolve into a smoldering puddle at Dorothy’s ruby-clad feet. I’m thinking more of those glorious passages by James Agee in Let Us Now Praise [...]

Interviews

This post brings the first of what I hope will be a regular feature on the [tk] review: interviews with some of the very talented female songwriters working today, discussing their music, their lives, and especially their ways with words. Last week I chatted with Alela Diane, a wonderful Portland-based folk musician whose albums include [...]