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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of his generation His first collection was published when he was still an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast Famously, Muldoon’s schoolteacher sent on a batch of his poems to Seamus Heaney (allegedly asking him what was ‘wrong with them’, to which Heaney replied, ‘Nothing’) and Heaney later recommended Muldoon’s work to his editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith   The result was New Weather (1973), a collection of ballads, songs, and references to the apparently inconsequential artefacts of everyday life Muldoon has since written eleven collections of verse, won a Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), and taught poetry at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of East Anglia He moved to the United States in 1987, and presently serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker and a Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, from where his latest book, The Word on the Street – a collection of rock lyrics written for his band the Wayside Shrines – takes its details of New Jersey life and lore   Paul Muldoon doesn’t like to go over old ground To read his poetry is to grow familiar with his presiding conviction that poetry comes in innumerable, changing forms The ludic wit, the acute sensitivity to what and how words mean, the verbal agility, and the freewheeling juxtapositions of diction – from the intellectual arcane to the low and demotic – permeate his work But its protean quality is most clearly manifest in the handful of books he’s published since moving to the United States In the book-length poem ‘Madoc’, in Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Muldoon supposes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey take up their fancy of founding a Pantisocratic community in North America – perhaps dramatising his own geographic relocation – in short sections named after different philosophers, diagrams, and the odd snatching of coherent narrative The Annals of Chile (1994) develops the form of pseudo-autobiography explored in Madoc, as it imagines the life Muldoon’s father, a one-time mushroom cultivator, might have

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

February 2014

Another Way of Thinking

Scott Esposito

feature

February 2014

I. There is no substitute for that moment when a book places into our mind thoughts we recognise as our...

poetry

October 2012

Bacon’s Friends

Stephen Devereux

poetry

October 2012

Always got caught out by their shadows: Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes, Cellophane fortune tellers curling...

fiction

Issue No. 9

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author James Murphy's Notes on Nicola Morelli Berengo

Francesco Pacifico

TR. Livia Franchini

fiction

Issue No. 9

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son. God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent...

 

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