Congratulations to Liane Strauss for receiving a fine review of her contest-winning collection, THE FLAWS IN THE STORY, from Mark Jarman and as published in THE HUDSON REVIEW, Autumn 2024. Here's an excerpt of the review:
"There is from line to line a sense of erasure, a lack of linkage, which can produce aphorism. In the case of “Forsan et Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit,” a passage of the Aeneid which has been translated various ways, the poet adds her translation in a note, “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Strauss attributes this version to Robert Fagles, in explanation of a line that had given him trouble as a translator. In Rolfe Humphries’ translation of the Aeneid, that line, from book I, is rendered, “Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure. ” Aeneas is reminding his shipmates of the perils they have survived before landing near Carthage. Strauss for her part is reminding us of the layers of interpretation that may come between a reader and a text. These surely are the flaws in the story. And it may be such flaws which give rise to Strauss’s aphoristic bent. As she states in the first line of “Sanctuary, ” “I know as soon as I wake up it’s time to start rethinking everything again. ” The occasion is New Year’s Day, but the experience, she implies, occurs every morning. For rethinking we can imagine reweaving. Like Penelope, we remake our stories with all their flaws, daily. Liane Strauss has given us an invaluable book of poetry about reading and finding ourselves in a paradox of being both narrator and narrative of our own lives. “History is lit, history is vanishing,” she writes punningly in the book’s final poem."
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