I'm happy to have my first piece in three years up on Numero Cinq, a review of Patrick Madden's recent essay collection Sublime Physick. I was a founding editor at NC, and the magazine still holds a firm grip on my restless heart. It's good to be back. Here's the first paragraph of the review:
"In the last sentence of his postscript to 'Independent Redundancy,' the mammoth centerpiece essay of his new collection, Patrick Madden quotes Gide: 'Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.' This might be just a bit too morose to serve as an unqualified summation of Madden’s essayistic perspective, but it’s pretty close. To read a Patrick Madden essay is to interface with the mind of an engaged, self-conscious thinker. Actually, that’s not quite right: It is to interface with Madden’s curation of the minds of many thinkers within the expanse of his own."