“All Art is Borne of Desperation”: An Interview With Elisa Albert

Elisa Albert

Human Blues, the complex fourth novel from Elisa Albert, tells the story of an indie rocker through nine menstrual cycles, as she tries to get pregnant. By her side, keeping her warm and spiritually alive through the labyrinth of doctors and unsolicited advice, is none other than the spirit of Amy Winehouse. This plot and structure alone made it a radical read. But Albert goes deeper. In the singular voice of Aviva Rosner, one worthy of Mickey Sabbath, Albert takes on the foundations of our society: the mythologies of motherhood, the industrial fertility complex, medical hubris, and the barren spiritual landscape. In a voice and style all her own: at once kind, wise, scathing but always funny, Albert has created a story that will challenge all you hold dear. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss everything from IVF, the Dobbs ruling, Taharat HaMishpacha, and trying out for Rent, among other juicy topics.

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Sitting Shiva for Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel

The year was 2003. America and Israel were fighting their respective endless wars, and as per the tradition of my Orthodox Jewish community I left home to grow my soul in the holy dirt of an Israeli Yeshiva. The transition trashed my fragile personality. Leaving Brooklyn stripped the meager armor I accumulated and left me confused by violent homosexual thoughts, unprotected from unexplored regions of self-hatred, and sickened by vivid day dreams of suicide. Life was suddenly plague-of-darkness level dark and I had no words but inarticulate howls. I was terrified to tell my parents, scared to let down my rabbi (his counsel would be to find a therapist who would not turn me away from God), and frightened to push away my friends. Each day to cope, I huddled, still clothed, into a spiraled scrawny mass on the dirty bathroom floor, crying into a warm amniotic sac of shower water and my tears. It was bad. 

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Encountering “The Violence of Living”: A Review of Mira Ptacin’s “Poor Your Soul”

Poor Your Soul, the debut effort from author Mira Ptacin, sets its sight on telling untold stories of women. The title, a delicious phrase taken from the idiosyncratic immigrant English of her powerful mother, signifies a complex, overlapping story of the bonds between two generations of powerful women dealing with death and the creation of life, using pain and suffering as the connective tissue. Ptacin, a native of the smaller Battle Creek, Michigan, finds herself beguiled by the glittering illusions […]

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Notes on Religious Striving For Good and Ill: Revisiting Marilynne Robinson

To talk about Marilynne Robinson and her work is to talk about an institution, with all the attending pluses and minuses of that framework. Her work needs no more acclaim or renown, she will continue to receive awards, and each new work – an essay, a story – will be welcomed as an event, as something to carve out time for and savor. And why not? Robinson, like the venerable Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Mary Beard or Claudia Rankine, is […]

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Notes on the Modern Elegy: A Review of “Gabriel: A Poem”

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch (Knopf; 78 p.)  Elegies, in our age of access to centuries’ worth of poems, can seem outdated, stilted, and perhaps even a bit indulgent. It’s hard to imagine a straightforward popular and populist book lamenting death like John Gunther’s howl of an elegy for his young son, Death Be Not Proud today. I find it hard not to feel an instinctive response of both been-there-seen-that and the attending tic of kindness that tells us […]

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Pain, Language, and the Spiritual: A Review of Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West”

Once in the West: Poems by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 128 p.)  Nabokov, while discussing Tolstoy in his Lectures on Russian Literature, explains that, “it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then […]

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Morality Amidst Nihilism, With Comedy: A Review of Adam Wilson’s “What’s Important is Feeling”

What’s Important is Feeling by Adam Wilson Harper Perennial; 200 p. In a conversation with author Adam Wilson, he conveyed that though he envisions himself as “a humanist in society he aims for nihilism in his writing.” This pithy and insightful phrase captures a deep desire of many writers in our environment: the desire for pure freedom. Most writers understandably chafe at the notion that you can place any limits on what fiction can or ought to do, and therefore […]

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Cultivating a Mind of Winter

Can poetry provide any consolation for the frigid horrors and endless annoyances of this Polar Vortex? Likely not unless you burn the pages for heat…but it can offer engagement with the peculiar beauty of this benighted season or distraction for those unable to will away the cold.  For the most part poets assume two postures towards winter: anger or awe. Winter, on the whole elicits depictions of its ferocity, its ruthless, merciless winds, frozen temperatures, and strange powder,  and depictions […]

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