Carmine Starnino on the art of reviewing

You love this so much and you're so angry at this bad book that you want to hurt the person. You want them to feel hurt. When I first started I thought I was acting as a consumer advocate. I thought people were being taken for a ride. I thought poets were poetically undelivering and professionally overcharging and I was--my reviews were--the cure. I really thought this. Then I realized that what I was thinking was appalling. And now I guess what I'm interested in hurting is ideas. Hurting trends. Hurting ways of thinking...

from The New Quarterly, Winter, 2008