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Our staff and contributors share their latest enthusiasms in books, music, podcasts, movies, TV, and more.

  • Nothing Fancy,” the new book by the food writer Alison Roman, makes the case that nobody should be too daunted by etiquette to have people over for a meal. “For anyone looking for tips on how to fold linen napkins or create floral arrangements, I am not your girl,” she writes. Instead, Roman teaches her readers to make “unfussy food”: homey meals that can be thrown together and snacks to hold you over when the throwing runs long. Roman gives cooks “permission to be imperfect.” It doesn’t matter if you don’t own wine glasses and your guests drink out of mugs, or if some people have to sit on the floor. What matters—and this is the core of Roman’s vision—is that a roomful of people can share food without pretense.

    Roman is no ordinary food writer. Given the viral success of #TheStew and the popularity of her book “Dining In,” from 2017, she’s more like a phenomenon. When “Nothing Fancy” came out, it jumped to the top of the Times best-seller list, and, when Roman announced a book tour, she sold out events in all thirteen cities. Like high-waisted pants or Sally Rooney novels, she’s now a style signifier for the creative class—a part of a shared vocabulary. Part of the appeal is her grasp of her audience: the financially unsteady millennial generation, which has turned “nothing fancy” into an aesthetic choice. Her cooking also mirrors a shift in thinking about nutrition. The culture has reëmbraced fat, and Roman uses it with gusto: butter, chicken fat, ricotta, labneh, coconut milk. She flavors her food with tastes from across the spectrum—earthy turmeric and tahini, bright citrus and fresh herbs—and then adorns everything with flaky Maldon salt. But her signature is accent ingredients, such as anchovies and preserved lemon, that are briny, tangy, funky, and polarizing. Without prohibitive costs or cook times, Roman makes food more interesting.

    “Nothing Fancy” has served me as Roman intended. At a Sunday dinner that started two hours later than planned, I put out her labneh dip with sizzled scallions and chili, and everyone declared it “bomb.” On a weeknight, I made her “Casual Apple Tart with Caramelized Buttermilk” for my roommates (the people I’m always “having over”), and they called it the best apple pie they’d ever had. But my favorite discovery is her “Perfect Herby Salad”: half lettuce and half herbs (parsley, cilantro, tarragon, mint), drizzled with lemon, olive oil, and, of course, Maldon. Like many of her best ideas, it has a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simplicity.

    The accessibility of Roman’s food is matched by the accessibility of her persona. On her Instagram Stories, she answers questions from her followers (What if I don’t have this ingredient? Is it O.K. if I skip this step?), and in “Nothing Fancy” she writes with chatty informality and self-deprecating humor. But her friendliness toward her readers is less convincing—and less interesting—than her annoyance at her guests, which she cloaks in recipe tips. About her D.I.Y. Martini bar, she writes, “Since making individual ’tinis for everyone who walks through the door is not on my agenda for any evening, I like to make one giant batch.” Or, on “Smashed Eggs and Fancy Fish on Crackers,” she writes, “Not to be rude but if you’re coming over, I am already doing a lot of work and I don’t feel like I need to assemble a cracker for you.” These moments lend her a queen-bee charisma. Whereas Ina Garten and Martha Stewart are prim and gracious, Roman, with her crackling chicken skin and red lips and nails, is libidinous and a little bit mean. Lots of cookbooks promise to help you entertain with ease, but “Nothing Fancy” makes that idea briny, tangy, funky, and a little polarizing: Why play hostess when you can be the life of the party?

  • Some years ago, I was seated at a play next to Mo Rocca, the television and radio personality known for “The Daily Show” and, more recently, “CBS Sunday Morning.” Out of nowhere, he turned to me and asked, in his unmistakable voice, “Do you know anything about Venus flytraps?” I’ve forgotten the tidbit about Venus flytraps that followed, or the reason they came up at all—what I remember is Rocca’s enthusiasm for knowing things for the sake of knowing them. That enthusiasm courses through his new book, “Mobituaries” (written with Jonathan Greenberg), an offshoot of his podcast of the same name. A Mobituary, as Rocca defines it, is “an appreciation for someone who didn’t get the love she or he deserved the first time around.” Some chapters are dedicated to “Forgotten Forerunners,” such as Elizabeth Jennings (1827-1901), a black woman who boarded a whites-only streetcar in Manhattan, a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. Jennings sued the Third Avenue Railroad, and Rocca, who has a thing for obscure nineteenth-century Presidents, notes that her lawyer was the twenty-four-year-old Chester A. Arthur.

    Obituaries tell us about lives lived, but also about whom we value. The Times’ project Overlooked has tried to right historical wrongs by giving obituaries to figures the paper previously ignored. Rocca isn’t as ideological as that—he’s driven by the desire to absorb great facts and pass them on. The quirks of history delight and vex him. He seems genuinely aggrieved that Audrey Hepburn died on the same day as Bill Clinton’s Inauguration and didn’t get her proper due. Same goes for Farrah Fawcett, who died on the same day as Michael Jackson. (One of the book’s many humorous sidebars lists other notable people who died on the same day, in case you were wondering what Margaret Thatcher had in common with Annette Funicello.) There’s even a chapter on historic figures memorialized by rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike—a motley bunch that includes Walt Whitman, Vince Lombardi, and Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. Mobituaries are not reserved only for people; Rocca also revisits the “deaths” of fashion trends (R.I.P., the codpiece), sitcom characters (pour one out for Judy Winslow, of “Family Matters”), and the country of Prussia.

    The final Mobituary in the book is for Rocca’s father, Marcel (1929-2004), told through his love of the trumpet, a teen-age hobby that Marcel resumed at the age of fifty, practicing in the cellar of their family home, in Bethesda, Maryland. Rocca credits Marcel with his love of long car rides, the music of Jerome Kern, and obituaries—curiosity paid forward. Also, Rocca notes, would you believe that the famous trumpet player Lee Morgan was shot onstage at Slugs’ Saloon, by his common-law wife? In our fact-challenged times, Rocca’s joyful tour through the “didja know”s of history is an unexpected antidote.

  • With populist movements surging around the world, there is no better moment to reacquaint oneself with the work of Karl Marx, who predicted our current economic condition back in the eighteen-hundreds. Fortunately, we have Mary Gabriel’s book “Love and Capital,” which tells the story of Marx’s life and work through the prism of his marriage. The book, from 2011, reads like a Flaubert novel; it humanizes Marx, and shows him as a flawed family man who likely never would have produced his world-changing writings if it weren’t for his long-suffering wife, Jenny. Although Jenny was born to an aristocratic Prussian family, she remained devoted to Marx through enormous hardship, often collaborating with him to get his ideas on paper.

    Marx’s theories were inspired by events that bear some similarities to ones seen today. In the Silesian region of Prussia, for example, the thriving textile industry went into severe decline after demand for handspun cloth plummeted. The industrial revolution had created a glut of machine-produced textiles, which depressed prices; meanwhile, the Prussian government refused to supply anti-poverty benefits to aid the newly unemployed. The factory owners responded to the decline in demand by cutting workers’ pay, driving them to desperation. In June, 1844, thousands of workers rebelled and destroyed the mansions of textile barons and industrialists. (The uprising was put down by force.) A few years later, during a debate on free trade, Marx disputed the idea that such trade would benefit workers, describing it as “freedom of Capital to crush the worker.” He publicly supported the policy, though, because he felt that it would cause so much suffering among the working class that it would hasten their eagerness for revolution.

    Gabriel’s book lends a sense of texture and intimacy to this history, giving us a ground-level view of how Marx’s ideas took shape. But it also reveals the relationship that enabled those theories. Marx spent more than a decade struggling to complete his masterwork, “Capital,” in which he hoped to show the world that capitalism existed primarily to exploit workers. He and Jenny lived during those years in worsening poverty, moving between London, Paris, and Brussels and trying to keep their children out of starvation. The first installment of “Capital” received little acclaim when it was published, in 1867; today, it stands as one of the most influential texts ever written. Without Jenny, Gabriel suggests, it never would have seen the light of day.

  • There are plenty of misconceptions about the discipline of copy editing—not to mention the temperament of the copy editor. Foremost among them is the idea that the laws of language are cold, hard, and immutable, and that a copy editor ought to guard against the perversion of the texting, tweeting masses. In practice, though, the principles that govern usage are ever-changing and open to interpretation; the trick is knowing when, and how, they should be broken.

    Cathleen Schine’s new novel, “The Grammarians,” is a rich study of the factions that attempt to define how language should be used. Schine, a former copy editor herself, gives voice and backstory to the opposing teams: the prescriptivist, who, pun intended, follows rules to the letter, and the descriptivist, who, rules be damned, strives to make the written word more closely match its meaning. “The Grammarians” personifies this conflict with a set of twins, Laurel and Daphne. When they’re five years old, the girls’ father inherits an old copy of Webster’s Second, and places it on a literal altar for their perusal; they collect and play with the quirkier words they find like other children would play with paper dolls. We follow Laurel and Daphne into adulthood, in New York City, in the nineteen-eighties. They move in together and get jobs: Laurel starts as a kindergarten teacher in a private school on the Upper West Side, and Daphne answers phones for a downtown alt-weekly. As twins in fiction are wont to do, the two switch places one day, and Laurel, as Daphne, stumbles her way onto the paper’s copy desk. When the real Daphne returns to work, she excels as a copy editor; in the ensuing chapters and years, she goes on to become the copy chief and a renowned language columnist. Under the guise of “The People’s Pedant,” Daphne writes screeds about grammar and usage—much like The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, if she were more concerned with correcting speakers’ conversational tics. “I am a professional scold, and I like it,” Daphne realizes, after she’s gained notoriety.

    As Daphne’s prescriptivism becomes more pronounced, it seeps into her relationship with her sister, who has discovered the wonders of Fowler’s Modern English. “He saw language as if it were living and breathing and muddling through like everyone else,” Laurel remarks, of Fowler. The book leads her to seek out more historical examples of language in its natural habitat, including letters collected by the Department of War. “The misspellings strike her as painfully eloquent, not mistakes at all, but cries of the heart, documentation of upheaval in a family, in a social order,” Schine writes. Laurel turns the letters into poetry, and breathless critics liken her creations to the revelatory samplings of a hip-hop artist. But, as Laurel awakens to the raw beauty of idiomatic writing, Daphne clings harder to the regulations that she sees her sister as flouting. The rift that’s been developing since the girls moved out on their own deepens into a full-on split.

    I’ve been copy-editing professionally for six years now, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t guilty of some of Daphne’s judgment when I’m off the clock. But, as I watched Laurel exhort the vitality and depth of imperfect grammar, I kept thinking about how she was the one who had awakened the People’s Pedant in the first place. While Schine’s twin grammarians advance distinct philosophies, the rest of us must reconcile the two, and consider each writer’s words on their own merit. “Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors,” Daphne says early on, before occupational hazards wreak havoc on what drew her to the job in the first place. But sometimes those misconceptions stem from the tools at the author’s disposal. Mediating between the Laurels and the Daphnes can be agonizing, but, at its finest, copy-editing ought to be an exercise in empathy—to serve the source text, the writer, and, above all, the reader, who should never sense that such deliberations occurred.

  • This year’s U.S. Open, the grand finale of the major tennis tournaments, has had no shortage of storybook moments. There was the heartwarming post-match interview that found the reigning women’s champion, Naomi Osaka, consoling the fifteen-year-old rising star Coco Gauff, both in tears. There’s the burgeoning romance between the men and women’s singles challengers Gaël Monfils and Elina Svitolina, who’ve created a playful Instagram account designed to stoke interest in their relationship. And then there are the villains: the maddeningly dominant Novak Djokovic, who was booed off the court as he retired from his third-round match with a shoulder injury; and Daniil Medvedev, a twenty-three-year-old Russian who rode “a wave of hostility,” in the words of the New York Times, to a victory in his third-round match, against Feliciano López. After losing a difficult point, Medvedev aggressively ripped a towel from a ball man’s hands, provoking a chorus of boos from the stands. Rather than repent, he flipped the crowd a middle finger and channelled the frisson toward a win. By the next round, media coverage of the incident had turned him into a modern tennis folk hero—someone capable of infusing a stiff and mannered sport with irreverence and uncensored passion.

    The passage of time has shaped Andre Agassi’s legacy into something shiny and clean, but there was an era, which now seems long ago, when he was the primary object of such fascination. He was the human-interest champion. This is abundantly clear in “Open,” a 2009 autobiography that adds depth and complexity to Agassi’s reputation as both a champion and an insurgent. “Open” is an unusual sports memoir in many ways. For one, it avoids the litany of clichés about the love of the game that’s typically espoused by professional athletes. (The theme of the book is, in fact, Agassi’s overwhelming disdain for tennis.) During its press run, Agassi foregrounded his relationship with his ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, the author of the beloved 2005 coming-of-age memoir “The Tender Bar.” Together, combining Agassi’s well of experiences with Moehringer’s delicate pen, they dissect the player’s trajectory, shedding light on Agassi’s agonizing relationship with his drill-sergeant father (a man who tried to feed his son speed before matches to enhance his performance), his repeated attempts to quit the game prematurely, and his reluctant foray into the celebrity-industrial complex. Agassi even confesses to using crystal meth and then lying about it after failing a drug test. Rather than sand down the edges of Agassi’s reputation or shroud it with platitudes, “Open” embraces his volatility and insecurities.

    Perhaps most resoundingly, Moehringer and Agassi deconstruct the mythic image that the media created during Agassi’s many peaks and downfalls. At various points in his career, he was written off as a jerk, a fame whore, or a brat. But the reality, as explained in “Open,” was different: his signature mullet was not a statement of rebellion but rather an attempt to conceal the fact that he was going bald at a very young age. The denim shorts, similarly, were not a pointed act of sartorial subversion but a hasty choice made by a naïve teen-ager who’d just scored a sponsorship deal with Nike. (The shorts had been in John McEnroe’s discard pile during a group fitting.) His relationship with Brooke Shields was not as glamorous as it seemed, either—Agassi spent most of it chugging “Gil Water” (a special hydration cocktail mixed by his trainer), nursing injuries, and avoiding celebrity-filled parties before divorcing her. Juicy, energizing, tragic, and compulsively readable, “Open” illuminates the unique loneliness of professional tennis players. Tennis has the greatest platform among individual sports; its players perform on some of the world’s biggest stages for hours at a time, without access to coaches or teammates, and typically in silence. There is plenty of space for narratives to be spun around people in this position.

    Reading “Open” a decade later, I couldn’t help but imagine what Agassi’s experience would have been like in the era of social media and high-definition replay. Maybe the heightened attention would have beaten him down, the echo chamber of headlines and think pieces sinking him into despair. Or, maybe, in some perverse way, our media landscape could have surfaced some of Agassi’s nuance, lending his actions a new frame, deeper context. (Imagine the Instagram captions he could have composed.) He’d have a shot, perhaps, at being seen not just as a punk or a superhero, but as a human.

  • The less noble side of activism is its performance, which seems to have reached its peak in recent years. In 2019, even “I Voted” stickers can feel a little show-offy, as though the wearer were broadcasting her moral high ground before scrolling through Instagram or buying an iced coffee. So it surprised me that Joy Williams wrote “The Quick and the Dead,” a novel that hinges on one teen-ager’s adamant support for eco-terrorism, in 2000, long before Trump’s election. In the novel, activism is all performance, but the world is in such a state of wreckage that it’s hard to say whether that’s a bad thing. Sure, it would be better if we could do something to save the sea turtles, but no one can say what, exactly, can be done. So why not feel good just talking about it?

    “The Quick and the Dead” is set in an unnamed desert town, where men shoot cacti and sometimes, accidentally, people. Alice, a motherless sixteen-year-old who has fully adopted the radical politics of her grandparents, with whom she lives, befriends two other motherless girls, Annabel and Corvus. The three have almost nothing in common but shared loss. Annabel is a pretty, consumerist popular girl whose mother was run over by a car, and Corvus is nearly dead with grief—she lost both her parents to drowning and then set her own house on fire. The three teen-agers spend the summer drifting between life and death, volunteering at a nursing home, navigating a taxidermy museum, and, at least once, tying up a boy for killing a sheep.

    Alice has good reason to be angry. The residents at the nursing home are being fed greyhound meat (one elderly gentleman questions whether this is the case; “Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” he says, “it doesn’t taste fast”), there’s litter all over the state parks, there are very few places she can go to feel close to nature anymore, and people are killing animals for sport. She considers sending Annabel’s father an anonymous missive to deter him from eating meat: “A HEART ATTACK IS GOD’S REVENGE FOR EATING HIS LITTLE FRIENDS.

    The anger, though, results only in a lack of autonomy. The boy whom the girls tie up eventually gets killed by the men shooting cacti. An eight-year-old protesting the taxidermy museum ends up adopted by the museum’s owner. And Alice meets a kid passing out candles for a company that hosts vigils for a different cause every night, so that people can feel better about their lack of control over the world. “Caring doesn’t have to be elitist,” the candle boy tells Alice. “True compassion is wordless and hopeless of effecting change.”

  • One of the particular pleasures of a folktale is discovering the story’s entryway to magic. In Max Porter’s beautiful, imaginative novella “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” it is mourning. In his whimsical follow-up, “Lanny,” which came out in May, it’s the natural world and a child’s unique sense of wonder.

    “Lanny” is the story of a child gone missing, lured away by Dead Papa Toothwort, a shape-shifting trickster who is as old as the earth. But Porter also focusses on the adults in the narrative: Lanny’s parents, a former actress turned horror writer and her less-than-extraordinary husband, and Mad Pete, a curmudgeonly artist who takes Lanny under his wing. As in “Grief,” Porter creates a kind of long-form prose poem, but the language of “Lanny” is as mutable as Toothwort himself. Some sections mime Lanny’s absence with bountiful white space and short, clipped declaratives. Others, describing the village-wide search for Lanny, are rushed run-ons, lacking attributions and quotation marks, creating a sense of muddled panic and frenzy.

    Porter draws his central figures with different elemental touches. Lanny, an impish, “creaturely” child who is compared to a fairy, and Toothwort, with his “moss-socks, pebble-dash skin,” echo Shakespeare’s Ariel and Caliban—they’re not just from but of the village, like Shakespeare’s figures were of the island, and they’re similarly enchanted by the lyrical delights of their world. (The “sounds and sweet airs,” as Caliban said.) Those delights are also in Porter’s words, which are wonderfully tactile—darkness is “uneven, slippery,” and Toothwort sees the “soft flesh of the village” from afar. Everything is pliable, porous, and Porter’s typographical treats—alongside his turns with sound, repetition, and rhythm—exhibit his irrepressible sense of play. He’s most engaging in the tense early scenes that foreshadow Lanny’s disappearance, moments when Lanny temporarily slips out of sight and Toothwort stalks him like a predator. And the thoughts of the adults, which we encroach upon like Toothwort on the village (voyeurism is another main vehicle of the story), shade this magic tale with darkness. A hybrid morality tale about environmental awareness, parenthood, and growing up, “Lanny” is enriched by its textures and stylized approach. It’s already been nabbed for a big-screen adaptation—and it’s abundantly clear why.

  • Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor of education at Harvard, was the first member of his family to attend college. During his childhood, in the eighties and nineties, his mother worked as a security guard to support her three children. Jack spent most of his youth in Coconut Grove, Florida, attending a distressed public-school system. A scholarship allowed him to finish high school in Miami, at Gulliver Preparatory, where many of his classmates drove Range Rovers and bragged about summering overseas. Though his stint there lasted just one year, Jack credits Gulliver for acquainting him with a “hidden curriculum” of social and academic expectations that govern life at élite institutions. By the time he boarded his first-ever flight, to Amherst College, he had already acclimated to a microcosm of the campus where he’d live and learn for the next four years.

    Jack went on to graduate with honors and complete a doctorate, in sociology, at Harvard. In his first book, “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students,” he summons his insight as a first-generation alumnus and his acuity as an ethnographer to study overlooked distinctions among low-income undergraduates on American campuses. The basis of Jack’s investigation is a two-year residency at an unnamed liberal-arts school in the Northeast, where he immersed himself in campus culture and conducted extended interviews with more than a hundred students. Instead of consigning low-income undergraduates, as university policies and scholarly articles often do, to one homogenous minority, he proposes a more nuanced language to describe and address the needs of different contingents. His research illuminates how and why the “privileged poor,” whose experiences at competitive private schools have primed them for academic success, outperform their “doubly disadvantaged” peers, who have languished in underfunded public schools.

    Recent debates over privilege and adversity in higher education have evinced a myopic obsession with the question of access: who gets in, and why? (The publication of Jack’s book, in March, happened to coincide with revelations of a brazen nationwide college-admissions scandal, in which more than fifty adults were indicted for scheming to channel the children of wealthy parents into top schools.) Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion. Rather than parse the spurious meritocracy of admissions, his book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising. Many of the challenges he describes afflict low-income students regardless of their academic backgrounds. Three out of four of the schools he studied, for instance, suspend their meal service during spring break, forcing undergraduates who can’t afford to fly home—let alone to luxury vacation destinations—to scrounge for food. Other, subtler challenges disproportionately beset the “doubly disadvantaged,” who have not learned to assert themselves in lecture halls and fellowship interviews, to ask questions and attend office hours, to enlist adults as mentors rather than hesitate to request their time and guidance. Jack spent hundreds of hours listening to his subjects, offering attention and advice in seemingly equal measure. The lasting beauty of his ethnography is that it gives a voice to the students who, as his research ends up revealing, most need it.

  • Toward the end of the late Indian writer Ismat Chughtai’s short story “Mutti Maalish,” Ratti Bai, a hospital maid, describes to an upper-class patient two methods of abortion used by poor women in India. One entails standing on the woman’s belly and massaging it with your feet; the other, more brutal method involves yanking the fetus out with your hand. So obscene is Ratti Bai’s telling that the patient throws up. After listening to an Urdu recording of the story, I nearly did, too. It’s the type of description that a native speaker, like myself, couldn’t imagine being effective in another language.

    As it turns out, in the hands of the right translator, it can be. “Mutti Maalish” was published in 1967, but it’s included, in an English translation by Muhammad Umar Memon, in the 2017 book “The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told.” Memon, who died last year, was an Urdu professor at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, and his translation is gripping and uncomfortable, which is likely how Chughtai wanted her story to be read. It’s not just a commentary on illegal abortions, but a scathing indictment of the vast class (and caste) divides in India, which exist to this day. Another of my favorite stories from the collection, Ghulam Abbas’s “Aanandi,” opens on a heated debate at a municipal council meeting about whether to expel the zanaan-e baazaari, the “women of the marketplace.” The story follows the prostitutes after a decision is made, with Abbas walking us through the ripple effects until we’re right back to where we started. It’s as much about prostitution as it is about how we rewrite history.

    “The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told” contains twenty-five pieces, and although the title may be a stretch (there are some notable omissions, including Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” and Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Bu”) it signals a promising resurgence of Urdu literature. In 1997, Salman Rushdie noted that English translations of Urdu and Hindi fiction were hard to come by. This has been slow to change in India, and slower in Pakistan, even with classic writers like Manto, Qurratulain Hyder, and Intizar Husain. Work by writers who are less widely known, such as Jamila Hashmi, Sajid Rashid, Zakia Mashhadi, and Tassaduq Sohail, are harder yet to find—but this is what makes Memon’s anthology special. By translating a diverse range of writers, he has introduced a new generation of South Asians—including the many Urdu speakers, like me, who can’t read the language—to the canon. Read together, these stories are a powerful retrospective of Urdu literature, starting from the founding of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in India, in 1936, to the partition, in 1947, and onwards. The only downside is that it’s likely to leave you thirsty for more, scouring the Internet for translations or hoping that someone, somewhere, is busy working on a book just like this one.

  • Diane Seuss’s fourth poetry collection, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl,” is named after a Rembrandt painting. The painting is almost mundanely monstrous, depicting one bird strung up by its feet and the other laid on its side, blood smearing the surface beneath it. But what’s unnerving isn’t the gore; it’s the gaze of the girl, perched at the window, who stares at the birds blankly. For Rembrandt, the act of looking itself is the horror.

    It makes sense that Seuss’s book, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a National Book Critics Circle Award, would take as its namesake a depiction of violence and witness. “Still Life” largely comprises ekphrastic poems that both mirror and clown the art works at which they gaze. The first poem in the collection, “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise,” sports long lines that are dense with rich, multihued descriptions: “jade / moths,” “gold fields,” and “mink-colored” rabbits unlock a world in technicolor. That world mimics nature in some respects—its features and behaviors—but reveals itself as a beautifully rendered hoax, made strange not by its dangers (“fields of needles arranged into flowers”) but by an inconsistency that they represent. The irony of paradise, Seuss knows, is that it’s a fiction at odds with itself.

    The picturesque and the grotesque pair flawlessly in Seuss’s poems, and even gore has an abject charm. In “Memory Fed Me Until It Didn’t,” she writes, of a cow’s head, “Its watery eye / gazes back at me and I fall in love. I fall in love again.” These oddities—not flowers or oceans but things strange and distasteful to the eye—are Seuss’s treats, and she presents them to us with a diverse, expansive palette. She uses paint-swatch colors, like “cream” and “salmon” and “smoke-gray,” and also figures and objects—dead turkeys, blood clots, Cheetos, Rice-A-Roni—as supplementary dyes and pigments. Color is living, tactile, something to be consumed. And yet, despite Seuss’s interest in art, she is never blinded by it. It’s not morbid curiosity that incites her observation but a kind of necessity. She admires art without forgetting that it’s only a facsimile; she questions whether reality, with all of its texture and dimensionality, can be known at all. What is lost in the gap between reality and its fiction? Perhaps everything. “Art,” she muses, is as “useless as tits on a boar.”

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