BOMB Looks Back at a Decade in Literature

BOMB has upped the game on their Looking Back series, in which contributors generally reflect on the year vanishing before us, and asked for a decade's worth! "BOMB on the Past Decade in Literature" features contributions from a handful of novelists and writers—including Kate Zambreno singing the praises of Dorothy, a publishing project—as well as poets Emmalea Russo, Vi Khi Nao, and Sally Wen Mao. From Russo:

Emmalea Russo 

In the early 2010s, I often dreamt that I was driving into a forest fire, transfixed-terrified by flames’ voracity. The decade opened in California. Then: Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey. I began the decade with Anne Carson’s Nox, which gave me the bodily relief of a very heavy book written by a woman after years of being instructed to read big books by dudes. Within its clamshell box lies one long page of unwieldy accordion-folded narrative of nox (night), loss, and remembrance. It’s the tenor of my decade, and guards the haunted entrance, splayed like a paper carpet, noctilucent and freaky. I let Nox unfurl along a set of railroad tracks in Baton Rouge, because there was room—something to do with being able to know the guts of an art through its container. 

Then: Hélène Cixous, French symbolists, everything Ugly Duckling Presse made, Sarah Rose Etter, Terrance Hayes, Mary Reufle—seismic shifts of the 2010s making poetry a necessary medicine. Recently, I read Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann on a flight during a California wildfire. I spent the last few years writing a book that contains within it the feeling of my decade’s beginning, and so time is a circle, and we’re all psychopomps moving between worlds. Poets most of all. The 2010s feel like those opening lines of Daphne du Maurier’s (who saw a major 2010s revival) Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” 

Read 'em all at BOMB!