The Reel and the Paperback
Refracted Ekphrases
By Carl Landauer
These sixty poems, in the new form of “refracted ekphrases,” explore the alchemic interaction of literary works and their film adaptations, playing with multiple layers of their narration, the cultural currents swirling around them, and personal experience. Among the book’s dual subjects are James Ivory’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Chantal Akerman’s of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, Otto Preminger’s of Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Sidney Lumet’s of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Terence Davies’s of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Vijay Anand’s of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide.
Notices
“Carl Landauer provides us many engaging opportunities to explore film and the works from which they originate in this ekphrastic first collection. His powers of perception are strong, as is the synthesis of his own words with phrases from the original, forming a unitary impression. He also allows actual conditions of the world (from literary and film criticism to historic conditions of the moment) to inform these satisfying, maximal poems. Omens of war and cultural upheaval sometimes enter, proving how the actual and the artistic can mesh. There is deep knowledge and attention here with sympathy to match in this accomplished tour of what readers have viewed in the history of cinema. Anyone who loves 20th century film will love Landauer’s work.”
—Maxine Chernoff, author of Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems
“If you are a fan of the eternal question ‘which was better: the novel or the film,’ you’ll be an even bigger fan of The Reel and the Paperback. Even a quick scan of the table of contents will take you into a darkened theater or a favorite corner with a book in your hand. Argue with your friends or simply ask if ‘we all just loved the Malkovich script’ or whether everything is ‘a situation, a sentence, a metaphor,’ all while enjoying Landauer’s syntactic virtuosity. Either way, you’ll fall down a delightful rabbit hole of memory and eternal wondering.”
—Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Emerita and author, Blue on a Blue Palette
“A cinephile and literary artist, Carl Landauer gorgeously widens the lens for us to see the cultural magic as well as the inner journeys and forays of mind the arts induce in us. How gratifying to read this book which point to our heritage and the foundation of his intellect. Here is truly a book I will reread again and again.”
—Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022
Carl Landauer, a visiting scholar with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies and contributing editor for Poetry Flash, taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill. His poems have appeared or will appear in the Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Exacting Clam, VerseVille, Poetry Flash, Santa Clara Review, Bangalore Review, Pembroke Magazine, Orange Blossom Review, Caveat Lector, Life and Legends, and the Mary McCarthy Society website, and his writing on cultural history has appeared in Beat Scene, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and Renaissance Quarterly—as well as a critical analysis of Project 2025 published by Public Seminar.