The Fortnightly Review in Review: June 2025
Magic and terror
We are back from our editorial retreat in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where we spent a blissful week at the Casa de Hypatia, the gorgeous house of friends of the magazine, to discuss its future. This boils down to: more poetry! More translations! Throwback Thursdays to material that was printed in the old New Series! Maybe even Wayback Wednesdays to material from the original TFR, the one founded by Trollope and edited by George Eliot’s romantic partner George Henry Lewes. Merch! A podcast?! We’re also going to be upping our social media presence. And spending as much time in pagan worship as humanly possible.
We didn’t just discuss the future of literature while sipping margaritas. We reached out to the acclaimed Mexican-American author Jennifer Clement, who lives part time in SMA, for an interview, and she said yes! Jennifer Clement is a force. The first (and so far only) woman to be president of PEN International, she also happens to be the first author featured in Dua Lipa’s new book club, for her remarkable memoir Widow Basquiat, a beautiful and tragic accounting of her friend Suzanne Mallouk’s love affair with the famous painter in 1980s New York City—if you liked Patti Smith’s Just Kids, you’ll love this book, which has just been optioned by none other than Steven Spielberg for a limited TV series. Clement’s newest book, The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me, explores her magical-realist childhood in 1960s Mexico City and the beauty and terror of early-80s New York in lyrical yet unsentimental detail. We had a wide-ranging conversation about those books as well as her poetry (I especially loved her long poem “Lady of the Broom,” inspired by an 18th-century woman with a desperate crush on Samuel Johnson’s bookseller father) and her fiction, followed by a decadent dinner.
A little teaser from the interview—the question was asked by yours truly:
TFR: I’m really struck by how your work engages with vulnerability, with danger, and yet there’s very little fear. Which is fascinating because the trauma plot is so dominant in our culture right now. Your books are laced with trauma but don’t approach it in the way we’ve come to expect.
Jennifer Clement: Good, I'm happy to hear that. I don't like being a victim, I think it's because I'm always entering through the door of poetry, so I'm always concerned about language…. Andre Breton came to Mexico on that incredible boat that everybody was on: Lévi Strauss, Leon Davidoff, who became the person who really supported Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and his daughter was my best friend. Breton was faced with Mexico and he just was blown away because he realized this is Surrealism and that everything that was going on in Europe in the Surrealist movement was false. So many people have written definitions of Surrealism: Borges wrote about it, Alejo Carpentier wrote about it, Diego Rivera did, and Breton in his manifestos. Octavio Paz said that it’s a moral position to be in Surrealism. For me the most important definition is when Breton says that Surrealism is against miserablism.
TFR: That really struck me.
Jennifer Clement: It’s been a North Star. Even when writing about the trafficking of little girls or the mistreatment of servants or my own life, I’m always very careful not to go into miserablism. The key is these ideas of Surrealism. I gave my own definition in The Promised Party of what Surrealism is to me, because I felt that all these definitions were very beautiful and magical, but what about the terror? That’s why I say, “and terror.”
TFR is not a Surrealist publication, or not only a Surrealist publication, but I think we all agreed that we too stand against miserablism and what Bob calls “the sad passions,” in spite of there being so very much to be miserable about in this moment.
Of course even as we were gallivanting around town we had a magazine to put out. We kicked things off with Kelvin Corcoran’s 2016 interview with TFR stalwart Peter Riley, who defended the poems of the Cambridge-Prynne groupuscule as “valiant attempts to use advanced symbolist and disrupting techniques to write a poetry which seeks to reach a depth and a totality of what we are.” We followed that up with Anthony Madrid’s rollicking “20 Epigrams and a Song of Despair,” KPrevallet’s incisive review of Will Alexander’s prose collection The Coming Mental Range, and two poems by the impish David Kaufmann. After a bit of science fiction from the great experimental writer Steve Tomasula, Marius Surleac and our Translations Editor Marc Vincenz collaborated on translating some (rather surreal) poems from the Romanian by Ion Monoran. Finally we brought you Moira Egan’s pungent dispatch from Rome, where she was caught between two popes, and what I consider to be one of our best “gets”: poems from the ongoing intertwined serial poems “Mu” and Song of the Andoumboulou by one of our finest poets, Nathaniel Mackey. A wonderful way to round out the June issue.
There’s more hot stuff to come in July: an interview with Chicago’s own Kathleen Rooney, jazz writing by Al Basile, translations from French and Turkish, poems by Lea Graham, Simon Perril, Aaron Belz, and more. Thanks for joining us on the journey!
