"Ahmad is aimless, easily led and given to self-dramatization: the melodramatic finality of martyrdom is an easier road to imagine than the long rebuke of adult life."

January Magazine

"Hamlet is replete with meaning—it encompasses the world bound in its intricate nutshell. It is, therefore, a feast for critics, and Bloom helps himself heartily. But the desolation of Lear exists outside of meaning, and silence is the preferred response."

Review of Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

Chicago Free Press (print only, PDF)

"The poem’s dignity lies in its keen awareness of suffering and its unflinching commitment to endurance."

Review of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf

Chicago Free Press (print only, PDF)

"the glittering floor tiles were meant to resemble an anamorphic recreation of the glittering Shanghai skyline, a magical image of hulking skyscrapers become suddenly light, impermanent and lovely."

Shanghai Biennale Report, Winter 2006

artnet

"In the oppressive summer humidity . . the damp green glass and looming monster have a dark, jungle feeling very much at odds with more aseptic conversations about authenticity and redundancy."

Shanghai and Beijing Art Gallery Review, Summer 2007

artnet

"The small, rectangular dioramas are reminiscent of Joseph Cornell, but while Cornell’s fragile collections are still and timeless, Son’s are dynamic, eternally fading; not Cornell’s held breath, but a single long, sighing exhalation."

Shanghai Art Gallery Review, Summer 2006

artnet

"In America's thoroughly consumer culture, it should not be surprising that literal consumption is a cultural battleground, whether fought over the puritanical rigors of veganism, the hypochondriac mania of food sensitivities, the slow self-destruction of anorexia and obesity, or the righteous decadence of gourmet organics."

Review of Laura Shapiro's Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

January Magazine

"It's easy today to imagine the Middle Ages as a time of great intellectual chaos, even stupidity. In fact, the Middle Ages was a time of great intellectual rigor and passion . . . when errors were made-and they often were-they were not the result of chaos, but the result of an excess of reason."

Mundus Senescit: Review of Umberto Eco's Baudolino

Rain Taxi (print only, PDF)

"Like many of our generation, Hunter finds that irony has crippled all his finer feelings, replacing great-heartedness with obsessive, relentless self-scrutiny."

Review of Charles Blackstone's The Week You Weren't Here

Identity Theory

"He can also be a dilettante, a complainer, a curmudgeon, and a misogynist. Nevertheless, he turns towards the world a diffuse, steady sympathy."

Review of Pentti Saarikoski's The Edge of Europe

Tarpaulin Sky

"There is certainly something of decay around Ueda’s elongated, wasting forms, all the more poignantly rendered in a medium easily bent, burned, or torn. Yet instead of the funeral stillness of a vanitas, Kako’s plant and insect forms are riotously living, even in the midst of death."

Interview with artist Kako Ueda

ALARM (print only, PDF)

summer block