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reviews

Body Geographic

“Body Geographic,” by Barrie Jean Borich

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In Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borich charts the route by which she came to be located in middle age, in the Midwest, and in long-term love with Linnea, a spouse who occupies the middle space of gender. Through jazz, photography, travel, sex, and lineage—including several generations of coffee pots—Borich tells of her individual journey towards full, adult consciousness, towards certitude of self and place.

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Possibility: Essays Against Despair

“Possibility: Essays Against Despair,” by Patricia Vigderman

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I like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two distinct (but linked) stories—one by Mary Karr, the other by David Foster Wallace—motivate her toward personal tangents and pleasures.

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An Elegy for Mathematics

“An Elegy for Mathematics,” by Anne Valente

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An Elegy for Mathematics, Anne Valente’s first full-length release, is a wonderful little book. Checking in at fewer than fifty pages, it’s a quick but deeply layered and poignant collection of material, most of which was previously published online. (She has a forthcoming story collection coming out from Dzanc Books.)

The collection is comprised of thirteen stories, mostly only a few pages in length.

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Fire and Forget

“Fire and Forget,” by Roy Scranton, Matt Gallagher, Colum McCann, and others

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“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new collection of wartime short stories, Fire and Forget.  “It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom,” he continues.

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Kind One

“Kind One,” by Laird Hunt

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Released from Coffee House Press in September 2012 and recently honored as one of four PEN/Faulkner Award finalists, Laird Hunt’s Kind One is a crushing and beautiful book. Taking place over the span of a century, 1830-1930, Kind One weaves together the lives of Linus Lancaster, his second wife Ginny, and his five farm and house hands, following how they brawl and bend from Indiana to Kentucky, through death and abuse, and into a future loaded with loss, defiance, and perseverance.

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Congressman Lincoln

“Congressman Lincoln,” by Chris DeRose

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On August 3, 1846, the day Abraham Lincoln won election to his only term in Congress, the gangly, 37-year-old country lawyer was unknown outside his Illinois district. America was a country of 28 states, largely unsettled west of the Mississippi. Political divisions were framed by non-regional differences on economic issues—tariffs, the national bank, the federal government’s role in infrastructure—much as it had been since the party system first developed 50 years before.

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