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The Sultan and the Wasps | Kenyon Review Online

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Story by Jason Novak, a brilliant cartoonist himself, and drawings by me.

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Guest Judge Richie Hofmann on the Art of the Book Review

As a book reviews editor at the Kenyon Review, guest judge and poet Richie Hofmann sees an array of literary critiques come across his desk. But the pieces that really catch his eye are the ones in which the writer is passionate about the book they’ve reviewed. This, he says, “is the best recipe for something that’s going to be worth reading”. This week, Lisa Hiton, writer, filmmaker and member of the Write the World team, chatted with Richie to find out more about what he’s looking for in a riveting Book Review entry.

Lisa: Your first book of poems, Second Empire, has been out in the world for almost a year. What does it feel like to have it on shelves?

Richie: First and foremost, it feels like a relief. Because it relieves you of the stress of wanting your book out in the world, which is the desire that defines most young writers, and to be free of that is delicious. Secondly, I would say that even though most people don’t read the book, including your friends, some people do read it and it’s really nice to be involved in a conversation with those people. I especially like going to meet classes of young people who’ve read the book and hearing their thoughts and having a conversation about what the poems meant to them or what questions the poems raised in them that they still have. That’s the best part.

Lisa: To that end, as a writer, what do reviews of your book mean to you?

Richie: I think a review is important to a writer for a few reasons. Probably, most importantly, it provides a platform for readers to find your work who otherwise might not. This is especially important for poetry, because I think poetry books are among the hardest to get into people’s hands. They don’t appear in bookstores with the same regularity [as books of other genres do], they’re not picked up by book clubs—poets don’t really have a place in a mainstream literary conversation, and so, I think reviews are especially important for poets, and even more important for first time young poets as a way of getting your book into people’s hands. From an intellectual standpoint, I think a review is interesting for the writer because you are curious how the book is being read. I think that is divided into two desires. One, you’re hoping that what you hoped to get across, comes across. That some goal you had set for the book is achieved by it, at least in one reviewer’s opinion. The other desire I think, is to learn something new about your own work. The extent to which that matters, I’m not sure, once it’s in the world, but I think writing is a process. Just because the book is out doesn’t mean the questions that animated the book are gone for you. It doesn’t mean that the narratives that haunted you and that haunt the poems in the book are finished. There’s a lot of use in learning something new about your own writing. The process of putting a book together is all about being up close and personal with the poems. Thinking about them technically, thinking about them materially in a way that you’re not used to—for  instance, how they’re laid out on a page, which is a question somewhat different from writing—but a review can put you in an alien place in relationship to your book again, and maybe, in the best case, teach you something new, or continue the conversation you’ve had with yourself about some of the important themes or images in the book. I really think that’s true, those two things. The most important thing is to get the book out there for people, which is something the writer just can do on their own. And then secondly, you’re looking to have your expectations met and then also exceeded. You’re looking for someone to both corroborate and extend your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about book reviews. What is the point of a book review? What purposes do different book reviews have? I don’t think they all serve the same purpose. Sometimes, they’re a guidepost to helping a reader understand the book. I think that’s ideal. And in that case you read a review of a book you’ve already read and it might teach you something new, or give you a new perspective on it, or give you information that will illuminate something. Usually, we skim reviews of things we haven’t read in order to determine that we want to read them, and so, we’re looking to the reviewer for judgement. Whether it’s a simple “yes, this is amazing”, or “no, this is flawed”, or the more typical, grey approach where we are focusing on strengths and weakness of the book. I think primarily the function of a book review is to bring people to a book. Or turn them away from one. We trust the reviewer to tell us how to spend our time, or not.

And the material fact of the matter is that there’s a large space traditionally in book reviews for young writers to be published and to get exposure for their own thoughts as critics and as writers themselves and to develop a platform that way. You know, traditionally, in academic publishing, which is far more codified than even literature, your first publication is probably a book review. That’s not to say that very distinguished, busy academics don’t write them as well, but there’s something about the book review tradition that is about giving young people a platform too, more so than other kinds of commentary.

Lisa: I think it’s also why English classes spend a lot of time doing close reading of texts that are longstanding, because every new generation has something new to say about a text as old as one by Shakespeare or even older. And about works as new as Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

Richie: Exactly.

Lisa: Can you describe your role in reading and editing book reviews at the Kenyon Review?

Richie: I’m in the stage where I’m sorting out for myself and with my co-editors, and with the editor-in-chief, and the Kenyon Review staff, what the role of book reviews is going to be. I’m most excited by reviewers who come to the table with a book they’re passionate about. I think that is the best recipe for something that’s going to be worth reading. Because it comes from a place of enthusiasm. Or real provocation. I think those tend to be more successful than people who are like “okay, what can I review”. I like a book review in which the reviewer has some relationship to the book. And that might be as simple as they read it and they really liked it and want to evangelize that book, or they themselves as writers are really interested in questions, say, of the representation of history and are really provoked by the way that a book they’ve come across asks those questions. Or they’re excited to read a book that they expect will speak to those issues in interesting ways. My favorites so far are from people who are passionate about proclaiming the virtues or exploring the issues of a particular book that matters to them.

Lisa: As an editor, what do you look for in a book review? Well, I guess “looking for” is what you just answered. So what I mean is, what are you reading for when the reviews are in front of you?

Richie: I would say—and I’m not sure the extent to which I believe this because the minute one has a standard or expectation for writing, it’s usually dismantled by some great piece of writing one encounters, so I say all of this with a kind of caveat that I may or may not believe what I’m about to say—but I think ideally, a book review gets down and dirty with the text. It quotes. It illustrates its claims with an appropriate number of interesting passages-—I don’t think we want one entirely made of quotes like some seem to—you want to have room to make a statement. I want to see those statements illustrated; that’s going to excite me toward picking up the book more than just bland, broad claims. So that’s one aspect. At the same time however, I think a book review ideally can make claims that can be extrapolated beyond the book that is the subject at the heart of the review. That in some way, it stakes a claim about, poetry for instance, in general, or history writing for instance, in general, or the direction of memoir in contemporary American writing, in general. It can make a claim that can be extrapolated and potentially applied to other books or to defining some part of our literary moment. I think that’s the balance that a book review ideally has between a kind of close attention to the text, but claims that are interesting enough that it doesn’t feel so myopically focused. A book review is different than a scholarly commentary. It’s not an essay explaining esoteric imagery in a poem by poem way. Ultimately, a book review will make a claim about what the book is, what the book is to the writer who wrote it, what the book is to the literary landscape that it’s going to emerge into.

That’s the balance. Pay attention to the text, but not myopically. Or not in a way that’s boring. No one wants to read extended esoteric scholarly commentary on random images and details. Unless they fit into some broader claim about the book at hand and the genre, time period, author, at hand as well.

Lisa: How do book reviews reflect or encourage a culture of reading? And why is reading important—it’s a thing that’s under-discussed when we think of creative writing: the act of reading?

Richie: That’s a really important question. In order to have a culture of reading, we need to have a culture. And in order to have a culture, we have to be able to speak to each other about things of import. Including: things of import that we’re reading. Book reviews, by their nature, are on the front lines of that conversation. They’re not the book itself—which is a very important aspect of the conversation. In many ways, they’re the first contribution to the conversation that book engenders by someone who is not the author. They tend to be timely. Major venues will, for instance, not publish reviews after the book has been published—they all come before. They’re very timely. Even literary journals which tend to be a little more flexible around time only review books within two years of their release. It would be rare to come across a book from ten years ago without some other circumstance that demands it, like an anniversary, or a new edition, or some cultural inspiration. That they are timely also makes them important contributors to the conversation. More often than not, they’re an intermediary step between the publication of the book and the picking up of the book by most readers. There’s a reason reviewers get advanced copies of books. They’re doing this in advance. The import of book reviews in the culture of reading is that oftentimes it’s the first sound about a book at it’s publication. That sets the tone for a conversation that the book wants to or doesn’t want to have. It gives something that a reader himself or herself can then argue with. There might be parts of a review that become agreed upon. By it’s nature, a book review is descriptive and it’s critical—it’s necessarily advancing the conversation, it’s giving readers something to agree with or disagree with as they then take up the book. If something is very provocative in a review, you might be compelled to pick up the book just to see for yourself. That’s one of the ways in which sometimes even really bad reviews can be good for a book, or can be a good platform for a book, because they might send the reader to a book to see for himself or herself just how accurate the review was in his or her assessment.

Lisa: Any last words of advice on what you’ll be looking for in this Book Review Competition for these young writers?

Richie: Yes. It’s advice I give to all of my students. It’s really the only rule in writing: be interesting. I really think that’s important and sometimes hard to remember when we are in the thick of our own work. Be interesting.

About Richie

Hofmann’s first book of poems, Second Empire, won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He is the poetry book reviews editor of the Kenyon Review. He is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The New York Times Style Magazine among others. With Kara van de Graaf, he founded Lightbox, an online educational resource featuring original interviews with poets and materials for classroom use.

About Lisa

Lisa Hiton is a poet and filmmaker. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Linebreak, The Paris-American, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and LAMBDA Literary among others. Her first book has been a finalist or semi-finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Brittingham & Felix Pollack Poetry Prize, the Crab Orchard Review first book prize, and the YesYes Books open reading period. I have received the AWP WC&C Scholarship, the Esther B Kahn Scholarship from 24Pearl Street at the Fine Arts Work Center, and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, Variation on Testimony, is forthcoming from CutBank Literary. She is the Interviews Editor at Cosmonaut’s Avenue and the Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal.

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Welcome to our Nature Writing Blog! 

This blog is created and maintained by members of The Kenyon Review Young Writer’s Workshop, 2015. We spent a few hours hiking around the Brown Family Environmental Center, the Kokosing River, the Kokosing Gap Bike Trail, and the Kenyon College Campus and used the interplay of text and image to capture our experiences. Thanks for reading! 

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EPISODE 6!!!  Meet the venerable David Lynn - Overlord of the Kenyon Review.