Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: #book essays

  • Saturday, October 17th, 2026 – Reading of Yiyun Li’s “‘Infinite Genius’: On Anne Carson,” published in The Guardian

    When I read Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God, I felt as though I were reading riddles in prose poetry, imagining the Pythia speaking Apollo’s words from her tripod at Delphi. It is strange in its arrangement of simple language, beautiful in its narrative of her inner world—a maze where she lets readers or listeners find her. Guy Davenport’s introduction summed up this collection: she wrote philosophy as poetry in language accessible to the layperson, with a poet’s eye, speaking to general readers, not a select few.

    Reading Li’s article on Carson becoming a Nobel laureate in literature this year confirmed my appreciation of the rare beauty of Carson’s poetry. I knew Carson was different from poets of our time because her poems were personal yet relatable, with themes ranging from her elderly mother to her former lover and her experiences in Italy. Li’s admiration for Carson’s literary world comes from Carson’s alchemy of words, which Carson conjures as her fingers move across a blank page. She has no grimoire for poetry, but she possesses the poetic mania that Plato regarded as sacred. Words will come when you write. Let the spirit move your hand.

    Although Li’s essay grows from her grief over the loss of her two sons and her reading of Carson’s Grief Lessons, which I have not yet read, her praise seems to idolize Carson’s work, contrary to Carson’s intentional use of plain language to reach the hearts of general readers. Moreover, Li’s effusive lionization of Carson’s work makes it seem to belong only to Li. Carson writes of love, of life, and of herself through the mind of a poet singing in plain English. She is something of a Socrates, who brought philosophy from heaven to the world by knocking on people’s doors to speak of the love of wisdom.

    I believe what is good for the mind—and ultimately the body, as the Romans said, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body”—should be shared. Carson’s status as a Nobel laureate should not distance her work from general readers by placing it among the untouchable literati. Carson invites readers into her maze and gives them language as a ball of thread, leading them toward the riveting light of her enchanting mind. I believe this is what Carson wants.

  • Writers of Extraordinary Hearts

    Saturday Reading of Kerry Clare’s “Beyond ‘Women’s Fiction…’ On the Quiet Brilliance of Barbara Pym,”

    published by Literary Hub on March 16, 2026

    October 10, 2026

    Muriel Barbery, Clarice Lispector, and Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) could give voices to women whose quiet presences belied the flame within. They could see the stories in what others dismissed as insignificant and draw readers’ attention to their lives. Renée from Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog was a sophisticated, erudite woman with an unacknowledged sultriness. Macabéa from Lispector’s The Hour of the Star might have been a shy typist but was an undercover beauty with her red lipstick. Prudence from Taylor’s A View of the Harbour was a lonely, beautiful girl who was never popular. Now Barbara Pym joins these writers of extraordinary hearts.

    I haven’t yet landed on Barbara Pym’s universe, and I’m happy to read Clare’s essay on her work and characters who sound a lot like the aforesaid characters. Her characters revolve around the daily tasks of ordinary life. Other writers often avoid such lives because the material is either (1) too unglamorous to attract readers from a milieu similar to that of the authors and their characters, or (2) too mundane to accommodate the fashionable existential dilemmas so prevalently narrated within elite literary circles. Some of today’s women writers also fall into this pattern, creating expensively educated women—or scholarship winners risen from rags—who are beautiful, independent, and supplied with lovers for passionate nights and days anywhere. Okay, I get it. I may be too biased, or too inaccurately accusatory, toward writers who don’t write like writers with extraordinary hearts. But if you know my point, I am sure you get it—don’t you?

    Writing about something you do every day can bore you and your readers. But if you find a story in how you do it, why you do it, and what you do—or will do—about it, that is the gem of the story; it makes the simple powerful. I remember reading a book about a legal secretary at a large New York City law firm, written by an author who drew on her own working life. Her narrative shows readers what routine work can conceal, giving them a reason to understand why people are the way they are.

    When I look at some of those who advocate for the rights of the oppressed and underprivileged, I notice that they do not always acknowledge the people around them in daily life. At times, ideology comes before humanity because writing about diaspora, social injustice, and identity crises is now presumed to be intellectual, just, and conscientious. Charlotte Brontë, who wrote about women compelled to work—usually under less-than-gracious employers—said that an author’s first duty was “a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature.” What could be truer than telling a story of a woman ignored and invisible?

  • Saturday Reading Notes on Bitter Water Opera

    September 12, 2026

    My reading today of Sophie Golub’s review of Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera is a literary matryoshka: a reflection on a review of a book I have not yet read. Yet Golub’s elegant summary of the story reveals the book’s undertone: a woman’s admiration for a particular artist. It is a story embedded within a story, conveyed through a reviewer’s reading of a writer’s book.

    The story revolves around a woman named Gia. She is the narrator, who sends unaddressed letters to Marta Becket, an artist whose art and inner life draw Gia into her solar system, which Gia tries to adopt as her own, because Marta is Gia’s kind of artist and person. She is at a point in her life where she needs direction. She needs a clear purpose in life, so she turns to Marta, who has already become a ghost hovering at Gia’s front door. Gia tries to find a reason to live in others’ lives rather than contemplating her own. She needs to see her own reflection in someone or something outside herself. Marta becomes that reflection, though Gia doesn’t realize she may have been chasing her own shadow.

    But I also get Gia’s point about why she favors artists who are dead and out of reach. I read this distance as Gia’s protective shield against the corruption of artists in the real world. In her mind, the familiar image of successful writers is shaped by publicity funded by their publishers and amplified by the media, all too obviously for profit. Likewise, I tend to be drawn to writers who have become ghosts because they are frozen in time; their human faults and imperfections cannot easily interfere with my admiration for their work. Both Gia and I internalize our own artistic principles and judge other artists against those internalized principles.

    I may not have read the review in the way it was intended. But basically, the review centers on Gia’s “existential ennui,” a state in which Gia loses her sense of meaning and desperately needs a model with whom she can identify. I can see something of myself in Gia because we are both interested in people with unique stories. Yet Golub does not allow Marta to remain a flawless model: Marta and her theater also need saving, and Gia’s final transformation is stated more clearly than it is felt.

  • On Reading “Student of Desire” — Adelle Waldman

    Saturday, August 22, 2026

    “Can intellectual recognition itself become desire?”

    Will an intellectual man fall in love with a woman of equal or greater intelligence? The question has become so entangled with sexism that it seems to invite textbook answers such as, “Beauty is only skin-deep.” But this is not about feminism or social activism. It is an intimate question: “Can you love me even if I am smart but not so pretty?” Waldman’s disappointmentpromptss her to ask about her existential value as a woman, not merely as a writer or intellectual, because the personal stakes are toohighg to ignore.

    Seeing her ex-boyfriend with a beautiful woman is painful enough to prick the pride of an intellectual woman who is supposed to believe that real love resides not in looks but in the mind. Or so it seems. Waldman extends the existential question into the erotic hedonism of The Professor of Desire, whose protagonist seems to vacillate between a whore and a virgin but never reconciles himself to the truth, always yielding to the pleasures of the senses. While I understand Waldman’s disappointment at seeing a smart man fall for a bimbo, she seems to explain his gorgeous new girlfriend as the result of animal instinct: Eros alone, without marrying Eros to Psyche.

    Call it the male subconscious urge to prove sexual prowess. Or immaturity. To me, a man’s intelligence or cultural refinement does not necessarily equate to his moral fitness. Think of the ancient Greek symposium and its beautiful and intelligent courtesans. Men, I think, are often more readily stimulated by the visual than women are. I remember reading that Updike had a voracious sexual appetite and engaged in sexual excesses. And that’s not the end. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe—even though she was herself intelligent, read books, and took literature classes at night—and his novella Plain Girl: A Life tell us that intellect does not necessarily determine physical attraction. After all, the plain girl finds her soulmate in a blind musician who loves her not with his eyes but with his mind.

    I know how Waldman felt when she saw him with such a beautiful woman. I think Waldman wants to believe that she is right: that a woman’s intellect can stand equal to beauty—par pari. I think Shakespeare is great because he recognized this human nature in everyone, including the rivalries of love:

    “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
    And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

    But remember: Cupid is blindfolded. He does not know whom his arrow will strike.