Sometimes there’s light at the end of the rabbit hole. When Josef von Sternberg’s film “The Devil Is a Woman,” from 1935, was recently screened, I was curious about how it was received in its first run and found a sharply perceptive review of it in the Times, by one Andre Sennwald, whom I’d never heard of. It didn’t take long to discover that he was hired as the paper’s film critic in October, 1934, at the age of twenty-seven, and that he died in January, 1936, at twenty-eight—by inhaling gas from his stove, in what the medical examiner believed was likely suicide. In that short span, he wrote plentifully. He usually produced four reviews a week, plus a more extensive movie-centered Sunday essay. (The Sennwald archive on the Times site, starting with his first review, on September 18, 1934, includes more than three hundred pieces.) But it isn’t the quantity of his work that makes it worth revisiting. Rather, he counts as one of the most insightful and forward-looking of early American film critics. While fitting new releases into the commercial whirl of the day, he offers a passionate perspective—guided by discerning taste—that reaches further, displaying a self-aware devotion to the future of the art.
Knapp’s plotting is skilful, her tapestry of stories cleverly woven. Characters that play a significant role in one of the three storylines appear fleetingly in others. Personality traits and preferences emerge in subtly different forms. As nature meets nurture, Cora, Maia and Bear/Julian/Gordon grow into distinct versions but remain recognisably themselves. Each version contrives to inform the others.
From the beginning of this collection, Stockton’s voice is exploratory while maintaining an unflinching gaze towards the polycrises of our time. The poems are organized into seven distinct sections rather than stand-alone works, and across these sections, Stockton brilliantly considers how extractivism, power, and desire play into both our intimate and extimate relations, with a penchant for lyricism and the subtle interplay of ecopoetic, affective, and psychoanalytical syntax.