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Literature & Democracy

Serhiy Zhadan

October 5, 2022

Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 2022. Photo by David Peinado.

“That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out. You can write about anything, literature allows you to do so without demanding anything back. The poetry of life is identical to the poetry of death.”

Ukrainian poet and writer Serhiy Zhadan is one of East Central Europe’s most important contemporary writers. We are proud to present for the first time in English a poem translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy, and two prose excerpts from “The Telephone Book of the Dead,” translated by Magdalena Baran-Szołtys.

“Whatever genre he is working in—poetry, prose (including both fiction and nonfiction), or dramaturgy—he has been passionately, persistently, and systematically giving voice to the voiceless,” notes translator Ostap Kin in his introduction. As Magdalena Baran-Szołtys has written, “Serhiy Zhadan writes about realities and feelings that we all have, but which we often only become aware of in all their force through his texts.”

Introduction: On Serhiy Zhadan by Ostap Kin
[Unknown saints have appeared in the city]
Excerpts from “The Telephone Book of the Dead”


This is the second in our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe.

Filed Under: Featured, Literature and Democracy, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: John Hennessy, Magdalena Baran-Szołtys, Ostap Kin, Serhiy Zhadan

Jehanne Dubrow

Small Cups of Shadow

February 9, 2022

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942.

I

n the diner, no one is eating. Three customers lean on their tall stools, none of them speaking. And behind the counter, a soda jerk bends to retrieve something we can’t see. Like a bartender, his job is to serve lonely people late at night, to pour them drinks, because that’s all they want in front of them: sturdy cups of coffee, cooling and forgotten. 

This is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, one of the best-known American images of the twentieth century. As with many of Hopper’s paintings, the canvas asks us to gaze through a window—the diner seems made almost entirely of glass—to watch people who do not know they’re being watched. A window contradicts itself. Both a barrier and an act of transparency, it keeps us out and lets us in. “No one is there to share what we see,” explains the poet Mark Strand in an essay about Nighthawks, “and no one has come before us. The scene of the picture belongs only to us. And what we experience will be entirely ours.” We stare at the four people in the restaurant as if we are the first ones to discover this sad tableau, and we wonder about the patrons, “What are they thinking?” their faces reduced to the simple shapes of eyes, nose, and mouth. 

There’s a woman at the lunch counter. She was modeled by Hopper’s wife, Jo. But, still, she could be a sex worker, we think, her dress the red of desire, her hair a small, controlled flame. She holds what looks like a matchbook in her hands and studies it. A man in a slick, blue suit sits beside her. He could be her john. They are close enough to touch but don’t, his hand curled around a cigarette. They are together. They are apart. We can’t help trying to read a narrative in their bodies. 

Around the corner of the counter, a few seats away, a man sits with his back to us. His suit is made of darkness, his film noir fedora casting more dusk across the side of his face. He is the mood of America in early 1942, Pearl Harbor having been bombed only a month and a half before the completion of the painting. It’s possible to see menace in him, the posture of a threat. He might be a man about to trade his suit in for another kind of uniform. Or, perhaps, he’s old enough to remember the last war, the acrid swirl of mustard gas, the instant coffee he drank from a tin cup at the front. 

The diner cuts a hard angle into the street; other buildings positioned behind it appear flattened and two-dimensional, like a set for a play. As is often the way with Hopper’s work, even the lighting here is theatrical. Inside the restaurant, on this night of solitude, no fluorescent lighting has ever been this sallow, has ever cast such a queasy, green glow across the floor. And the only door visible in the diner leads to the kitchen, not to the world outside. If these people wish to go, they will have to leave by an exit out of view, off stage. 

When I was a young woman, I worked as a barista in a tiny coffee shop. And, although I poured many shots of espresso, steamed gallons of milk over the years, most of my days were spent brewing vats of coffee. I learned to expect the burn of hot liquid spilled on my hands, the coffee slopping over the rim of the paper cup as I covered it with a plastic lid. I learned to expect the smell of stale beans in the seams of my clothes. Still that initial sip of bitterness each morning never stopped surprising me, even when I came to like it. 

Coffee is what we drink to wake up or to stay awake. It’s the drink of early risers and workaholics. Also insomniacs. As adults, many of us come to crave this brown sludge, surely the very definition of an acquired taste. When I was a barista, my first customers of the day always ordered their coffee black, no milk or sugar to soften its sharp edge. The customers who came in just before I closed the store for the evening took theirs straight as well, often on their way to the late shift at the hospital down the street.

The shop where I worked was nothing like the diner in Nighthawks. It had brief, smudged windows and a straightforward exit to the outside. But I served many people who resembled the ones in the painting. I watched them ruminate over their small cups of shadow, alone even in their togetherness. “What is it about Hopper?” asks Olivia Lang in The Lonely City. “He never much liked the idea that his paintings could be pinned down, or that loneliness was his métier, his central theme.”

Haven’t we all hunched over our coffees like this, Hopper’s theme equally our own? At some late hour, we have all felt utterly by ourselves in rooms where the light seemed suddenly strange, so green, as if rendered with meticulous brushstrokes. How still we have sat in the sickly, bitter light.


Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, Throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in NER as well as in Poetry, Southern Review, and Colorado Review, among others. “Small Cups of Shadow” is part of her second book of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2022.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or architecture.

Filed Under: Confluences, Featured, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Edward Hopper, Jehanne Dubrow, Nighthawks

Dave Griffith & Kyle Peets

Station XI

November 17, 2021

Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966. Photos by Barnett Newman on WikiArt.

T

his text/sound collaboration between Dave Griffith and Kyle Peets is an excerpt from Days Between Stations, their fourteen-part audio project set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The text reflects on Griffith’s experience viewing for the first time Barnett Newman’s fourteen-painting series Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958–1966). The viewing was not in person but online at Griffith’s dining room table.

The project takes as its inspiration the Stations of the Cross or Way of the Cross, a religious ritual carried out during the Christian season of Lent in which participants memorialize the Passion of Jesus by praying, singing, and processing before special icons depicting his journey to his crucifixion.

While not intended to be explicitly religious, Days Between Stations does borrow the narrative structure and the narrative device of tableaux from the ritual. It also draws on the rich literary tradition of walking as an aid to personal reflection and as a means of exploring the isolation, longing, and grief experienced by many during the pandemic.

The text and accompanying ambient music were composed independently of one another during the pandemic at a distance of over 2,000 miles—Griffith in Indiana and Peets in Oregon. They did not have access to each other’s work during the composition. This was to ensure that any synchronicities would be accidental, though in the sound mixing stage, some musical choices were made to accentuate textual decisions.

An e-book version of the original MoMA exhibition of Newman’s paintings can be viewed here.


Dave Griffith is an essayist and educator and the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in print and online at the Paris Review, the Normal School, the Utne Reader, Killing the Buddha, and Image, among others.

Kyle Peets is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO), as well as various group exhibitions, including Character Profile at Root Division gallery (San Francisco, CA), Art Is Our Last Hope at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, as well as a graduate certificate in book arts from the Iowa Center for the Book.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings.

Filed Under: Confluences, Featured, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Barnett Newman, Dave Griffith, Kyle Peets

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Writer’s Notebook—Surrender Your Biometrics Here

November 2, 2021

[Natalie Scenters-Zapico, photo by John Markadakis]

Before the pandemic, I made one of many trips from LAX to MEX with my husband. I have family in Long Beach, so it’s easy to catch a flight to Mexico City after visiting them. On my way home from one of these trips, I was struck by how fierce border protection through airline travel had become.

As many of us have experienced, agents blare over loudspeakers not to use our phones, they corral us into tinier and tinier buses, then to large cordoned off rooms filled with machines to process our documents and take our photos, until finally we wait for a receipt of judgement that tells us if we can go through the glass gates or if we must stop and speak with an agent. I am always anxious during these encounters, but usually because I am traveling with someone who is seen as “suspicious” by the state. My whole life my loved ones have been seen as a threat to the state in some capacity, and I have always been placed in the room just outside to wait and see if Homeland Security will leave me stranded in this country without anyone I love in it. It’s a peculiar and common position many are put in. On the one hand, it is a position of the privileged to have citizenship, on the other hand it puts one a stone’s throw from having everything that gives your life meaning in a country (mothers, fathers, siblings, partners) taken from you. 

My husband started the paperwork to become a citizen the week Trump was elected to office. I wish I could say it was because he wanted this, but the truth is more like I was terrified of losing him. When he finally went to a courthouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, to swear allegiance to the country that actively wanted him deported for over a decade, let’s just say it was emotional. Courthouse employees handed out tiny American flags to each new citizen. His class of applicants, if you will, was the first to be welcomed to the country by a DVD of Donald J. Trump. I wish I could tell you I remember what Trump said in that video, but I do not. I only remember being terrified that something could go wrong at any moment. When you grow up dictated by agents from Homeland Security and CBP you know all too well that what they say is “routine” can quickly turn into a routine to destroy your life. As my husband raised his right hand to say the oath, he looked so far away. The whole process felt terribly painful to me. But what was my pain compared to his? After the ceremony we both left the courthouse directly to teach at the university a few blocks away. No time off for a US citizen. 

Perhaps this is why on a return flight from MEX to LAX I was in shock when I was told that I had to go speak with an agent, and my husband would be the one waiting for me on the other side of the immigration barrier. It was a complete reversal of roles. Though I am a citizen of this country from birth, I was nervous. What could they possibly want from me? As my poem “Present this receipt to CBP” details, it was to present me with a sales-pitch for Global Entry, in which I surrender my biometric information so that I can further use the privilege of my citizenship to stand apart from my family. When I see people speed by me at the airport because they have biometric visas like Global Entry or CLEAR, I can’t help but see the cosmopolitan elite using its giant shoe to step on those who don’t have such privileges. In that moment though, nodding and smiling through the agent’s pitch, I realized that I was being asked to make a choice: Be a part of the cosmopolitan elite or stand harassed like the rest of the crowd. 

I have yet to apply for Global Entry. Truthfully, I refuse to do so. I’ll wait in line with the masses. I’m no foreigner to waiting in lines having grown up crossing the US-Mexico border from El Paso to Juárez and back frequently. We are in an era that asks us to document and surrender every part of ourselves. Perhaps a small act of radical rebellion can be to say: No. 


Natalie Scenters-Zapico‘s poems “Present This Receipt to CBP” and “Agent” appeared in NER 42.3. She is the author of Lima: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). Scenters-Zapico has won Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Florida.

Filed Under: NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Writer's Notebook

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Vol. 43, No. 4

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Tomas Venclova

Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

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