Reviews
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Poems Are Really for People Who Don’t Read Them: on Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder”
Ten chapters, if you will, demarcate a full life of writing, storytelling, and keeping history. Each section opens with a prelude—an interface with the interior of a poet reviewing the lens through which the work was made then and how…
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You Can’t Go Home Again: The Displacement and Grief in Aracelis Girmay’s “Green of All Heads”
Colonization is central in the web of elements that shape the book toward a mournful tone. Girmay sets us up knowing we are situated in an unstable reality. Point of view and even personhood are interchangeable. Identity is lost. Through…
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Enduring “The Long Walk”
Critics have also noted that several of the characters in the film are composites of characters from the book. They have pointed out that the filmmakers conflate two memorable characters from King’s novel—Scramm and Stebbins. In the book, Scramm is…
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The Cost of Ambition in Allie Tagle-Dokus’s “Lucky Girl”
But while the focus of the plot revolves around childhood fame, its core deals with what ambition can cost an artist
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“This Is Not a Drill”: Maggie Nelson’s New Book, “The Slicks”
…Her sensitivity to complicated dialogues about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath is well considered
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Review: “Love is a Dangerous Word,” by Essex Hemphill
Essex Hemphill’s treasured and defiant legacy as both an activist and poet, is elevated by editors Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, with Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2025). Hemphill’s genius is integral to a multi-voiced…
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Brandon Kilbourne’s “Natural History” is a Meticulously Crafted Diorama
Natural History opens with a section called “The Curious Institution”, in conversation with the centuries-old euphemism for slavery, “the peculiar institution”. This sets the stage for the rest of the text, which never lets the marvelous curiosity of the natural…
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Procrastistitching and Learning Who You Are
This little collection of essays made me want to sew. And knit. And do a bit of embroidery. It made me want to slow down, and create the world I want to live in.
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Gaar Adams’ “ Guest Privileges Deconstructs” “Isn’t it Harder There?” for LGBTQ+ People in the Gulf
To witness the bureaucracy and legalities that don’t stop queer and trans people from simply existing is a witnessing worth entering into.
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The Unkindness of Time: Elaine Sexton’s “Site Specific: New and Selected Poems”
One minute we are on a coastal road; the next we share quiet thoughts in a country house, while looking at an old screen door which conjures up temporal family memories. At another moment we are watching a jet trail
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Inquiry, Lineage, & Archive: A Review of Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home
Each line urges its own set of questions. How to reconcile being an “unplanned letter” — is this future-telling, or regret, or hope? [T]heir stone-clad letters juxtaposed against familial flesh and blood bring to mind stone’s durability across time, a…
