{"id":281546,"date":"2011-01-17T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/01\/17\/latest-review-the-book-of-things-by-ales-steger\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:00","slug":"latest-review-the-book-of-things-by-ales-steger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/01\/17\/latest-review-the-book-of-things-by-ales-steger\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "The Book of Things" by Ales Steger"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is a piece by Tim Nassau on Ales Steger’s The Book of Things<\/em>, which is available from BOA<\/span> Editions in Brian Henry’s translation from the Slovenian. <\/p>\n

If you don’t know BOA<\/span> Editions, they’re one of the premiere publishers of poetry in the U.S. and do a number of books in translation. They also happen to be based here in Rochester and their publisher is my good friend Peter Conners.<\/a> In addition to guiding this admirable non-profit, Peter is a poet himself and author of two very cool works of nonfiction: Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead<\/em> and the more recent The White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg.<\/em> (Yes, there is a theme here.) Anyway, Peter’s not really the focus of this, so shout out over. <\/p>\n

Ales Steger<\/a> is one of those European poets whose name comes up time and again, be it in the Boston Review<\/em><\/a> or Guernica<\/em><\/a> or in Graywolf’s New European Poets<\/em> anthology of a couple years back. I was actually a bit surprised to find out that The Book of Things<\/em> is his first collection to be published in English translation. <\/p>\n

Tim Nassau<\/a> was a summer intern back in the day, and is a bit Open Letter fan and regular contributor to Three Percent. He’s also supposed to stop by the office in the next few hours, so I feel compelled to say nice things about him.<\/p>\n

Here’s the opening of his review:<\/p>\n

\n

Literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing in the 1930s, said that the pieces of Gertrude Stein\u2019s Tender Buttons<\/em> were intended to be \u201cprose still-lifes to correspond to those of such painters as Picasso and Braque. A pattern of assorted words, though they might make nonsense from the traditional point of view, would be analogous to a Cubist canvas composed of unidentifiable fragments.\u201d The first two sections of that book are entitled \u201cObjects\u201d and \u201cFood,\u201d and those are the main subjects of Slovenian poet Ale\u0161 \u0160teger\u2019s The Book of Things<\/em> (with a few animals thrown in as well). The collection, which consists of 50 poems\u2014a poem followed by seven sections of seven \u201cthings,\u201d from raisins and bread to tapeworms and windshield wipers\u2014is the poet\u2019s fourth and the first to appear in English translation. While Stein sought to portray her things by breaking them down into tiny linguistic pieces and collaging those bits back together, \u0160teger\u2019s cubism is in the addition of angles: like in Toy Story<\/em>, objects are given literal lives of their own that are here drawn out; the things we so often overlook become the repositories of our own human fears and dreams. The effect is often disarming and although the individual success of each poem is inconsistent, there is enough beauty and surprise in these lines for \u0160teger\u2019s stature as one of Slovenia\u2019s best young poets to be amply justified. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

So, as expected, the things described in this book are defamiliarized and here, often, \u0160teger is at his best. The way he personifies an object, or the metaphor he uses, is never obvious, but it always makes complete sense. That when you open an umbrella \u201che unbuttons his too-tight tuxedo\u201d is an image that could very well become engrained my experience of walking in the rain. The description of a cat as a \u201ccastrated transvestite in fur\u201d also belies a strain of humor, or at least a taste for the uncanny. The effect of such language, however, can at times be discomfiting. In \u201cSausage\u201d we are asked \u201cIs your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth. \/ Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.\u201d Though destined to be a lifelong carnivore, the reminder that a sausage is a body in the same way that I am a body is sobering.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the full review. (And for the official count, this is the fourth review of 2011 . . . Only 96 more to reach our goal . . .)<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on Ales Steger’s The Book of Things, which is available from BOA Editions in Brian Henry’s translation from the Slovenian. If you don’t know BOA Editions, they’re one of the premiere publishers of poetry in the U.S. and do a number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[37596,15416,37606,37626,1646,37616,23996],"class_list":["post-281546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-ales-steger","tag-boa-editions","tag-brian-henry","tag-poetry-reviews","tag-review","tag-slovenian-literature","tag-tim-nassau"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312416,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281546\/revisions\/312416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}