The Fortnightly Review in Review: May 2025
Closing out our third issue with a little help from Margaret of Anjou
We kicked off the May issue with Susan Blumberg-Kason’s interview with Robin Hemley, novelist and nonfiction writer, a conversation that touched on history, memory, legacy—and the power of curses. As Hemley points out, “Some of the best curses are those spoken by those who have the least power in society.” I was reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third when one powerless ex-queen, Elizabeth, seeks the counsel of another ex-queen, Margaret, who has no reason to love her: “O thou well-skilled in curses, stay awhile, / And teach me how to curse my enemies!” Margaret’s acid reply:
Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were fairer than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is:
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse:
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
Is this speech merely cynical, implying that the most cursing can accomplish is a kind of rhetorical fiction, an effeminate feint? (Recall Hamlet’s self-accusation that he can only “unpack his heart with words, / And fall a-cursing like a very drab, / A scullion!”) Or is there a hint of acknowledgment here that Margaret herself is guilty of exaggerating the moral difference between herself and the ultimate object of her curses, King Richard? After all, as queen, Margaret took direct part in the humiliation and murder of Richard’s father, Richard of York, in The Third Part of Henry the Sixth. Margaret, unlike Elizabeth, has actually tasted power and led troops into battle: in the earlier play she is nicknamed “Captain Margaret” by her enemies and defiantly resolves “my mourning weeds are laid aside / And I am ready to put armor on.”
Margaret is defeated, her husband killed, her own life preserved as a kind of trophy. At the start of Richard III she is a kind of living wraith, left to haunt the glorious summer of the sons of York. Yet Margaret’s curses, rained down throughout the play on the heads of her Yorkist enemies, seem to have the uncanny power of coming true. No wonder Elizabeth asks her for tips! The deposed queens understand, as their author Shakespeare understood, that language has an uncanny power to shape—not events, but the ways in which those events come to be understood. That’s the slender thread of morality that curls around the words of the dispossessed—a necessary fiction if righteousness is ever to sheathe the otherwise naked sword of power.
We are not in the business of publishing curses at TFR, but we are cognizant of the power of language to shape our understanding, doing quietly extraordinary things in the name of the human spirit. Consider the range and quality of this past month’s installments, and their sometimes startling, unlooked-for resonances with each other. Ed Park’s surreally funny satire, “The Good Neighbor,” rhymes mysteriously with Sally Ashton’s literally luminous dispatch from the moon: both center on self-undoing figures in the manner of Goldilocks, making themselves at home where they most decidedly do not belong. The lunar theme is picked up by John Taylor’s translation from the Italian of new poems by Franca Mancinelli, who informs us that “the earth turns, it is a cradle” while “the darkness we bear opens up / the space between the stars.” Another extraordinary journey is taken via Janet Sutherland’s sonnets with titles adapted from the journal of her great-grandfather, who embarked on a trip around the world back when the original Fortnightly Review was just hitting its Victorian stride. Old movies pop up in those poems and in Lea Graham’s elegiac “Psalm,” while John Gallaher issues wistful, mordant apologies to Greenland and the dolphins. Meanwhile, Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s memoir of the late Amiri Baraka insists on recalling “lyricism amidst the roar of his politics,” remembering Baraka as a poet and not merely as a firebrand, even as Warren Beatty makes a surprising appearance. And Rachel Hadas offers two poems “drawn to themes of memory and loss.”
Our June issue, the first installment of which arrives on Wednesday, is shaping up to be another banger. We look forward to publishing new poems from Nathaniel Mackey, David Kaufmann, and the inimitable Anthony Madrid; poems from the Romanian by Ion Monoran, translated by Marius Surleac and our own Translations Editor, Marc Vincenz; K. Prevallet’s review of Will Alexander’s new work of poetics, The Coming Mental Range; an essay on writing about jazz from Al Basile; Kelvin Corcoran’s interview with Cambridge poet Peter Riley; and a memoir-esque piece by Joseph Donahue (one of my favorite living poets) called “As the Stars Are Apart: Blaketalk.”
It’s easy to lose heart in a society (and culture industry) ruled by ruthless imbeciles and algorithms. I am heartened and amazed by the range and richness of the writing we’ve been able to publish in the three months since we launched the new New Series here on Substack. Literature is neither curse nor prophecy, but it insists on keeping the richness and strangeness of language alive in the teeth of those who would deform it. That’s not nothing.
