In a previous letter, Simone had asked André to tell her about his work. With war all around, André began his reply cautiously, warning his sister that past a certain point “you will understand nothing of what follows.” Over the next 14 pages, he sketched his idea for a “Rosetta stone” for mathematics. Following the example of the famous engraving by that same name — a trilingual text that made ancient Egyptian writing legible to Western readers through translation into Ancient Greek — Weil’s Rosetta stone linked three fields of mathematics: number theory, geometry, and, in the middle, the study of finite fields.
Writing was a refuge from all that. Writing was rest. The page was a place of order and controlled outcomes, and I worked from a firm set of rules. These weren’t the kind of craft suggestions I taught the students in my writing classes; they were of a different order and entirely arbitrary, and yet I adhered to them strictly. If one paragraph had seven lines, the following paragraph had to have three or four. The one after that had to have ten. Or one. Or be a single word. In the middle of a scene, I would stop everything and count. If the math didn’t add up, I made myself start over.
A coming-of-age novel with a quarter-life-crisis thrown in, “The Skunks” is told in a stream of consciousness with a cynical sort of oddball humor that’s completely Warnick’s own. Reading “The Skunks” is like drinking a cool glass of water on a hot summer day — it’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it’s wholly necessary, gratifying and gone before you know it.
Poetry is a form of scrutiny, an inquiry that, when it succeeds, advances further than it is possible to go in prose. Rowland Bagnall’s attractively questing second collection is an investigation of consciousness. Like Virginia Woolf, he records moments of being although, unlike her, his moments are likely to be guarded and seldom ecstatic and to involve openly philosophical reckoning. He is curious about how to situate himself – and by implication us – in time and space. The recognition that time can neither hold or be held is at once an ongoing preoccupation – and a provocation.
Across 12 essays, Attachments. catalogs the travails that beset today’s young fathers. Mann examines his feelings of protectiveness while watching his daughter at the playground, considers his own issues with body image as occasioned by watching Brad Pitt eat foodstuffs throughout his film career, and watches LeBron James make fatherhood a vital pillar of his public persona. Parenthood in general, and modern fatherhood in particular, proves to be an ideal subject for Mann’s approach. The strange mix of self-deprecation and self-congratulation produces a figure of humor and even pathos. See the dad of today patting himself on the back while he cries into his coffee.
The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.