criticism
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Books that Made Me Gay: “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice
Decades before Stephenie Meyer shook up high schools worldwide with her anemic, Mormon vampires and years before Buffy ever kissed Spike, Anne Rice, the spiritual godmother to each beautifully insane individual to ever post horny slash fic on AO3 and…
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On Natalie Shapero’s “Stay Dead”
In Shapero’s words, “everyone is a worker.” If many of life’s actions are performances done for payment, so that even oxygenation is “a service / the woods provide,” then art forms like acting, painting, and writing are also determined by…
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Now More than Ever, We Need “The Happiest Band on Earth”
It’s a sentiment at the core of The 502s’ origin story. In 2015, Isola and a pair of cousins founded the band, and while they were searching for a name, Isola and one of the cousins (who happened to live…
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The Taxonomy of Girlhood: Review of Susan L. Leary’s “More Flowers”
More Flowers interrogates how patriarchal authority persists even in its absence, transmitted through maternal caretaking rather than overt dominance. While an authoritative male figure is not present, the mother still governs by his rule, passing down restrictive and traditional expectations…
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Obliteration and Authorship: On Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers”
Jon-Perse’s vision for computer generated poetry can be summed up as a kind of obliteration of the author.
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Meaning in the Ice and “A Violence: Poems” by Paula Bohince
Like silence, violence is not quantifiable. Put the indefinite article “a” in front of it and the monolithic world of violence shutters into a reflective surface of infinite, biodiverse fragments. What counts as violence?
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A Backyard of One’s Own: The Meticulous Ecology of Cecily Parks’ “The Seeds”
The incisive precision of The Seeds’s assemblage cannot be overstated: if the collection is an ecosystem, its sections and sequences are habitats, and each poem is a haunt. The poems are divided into five sections, bookended by a hackberry, and…
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What Holds: Manners and Memory in “The Summer We Ate Off the China”
This refusal to treat trauma as singular or sacred, to set it apart from the texture of ordinary life, is among the collection’s quietly bracing achievements. Jacobson’s stories don’t deny suffering. But they do deny it the dignity of exception…
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Review: Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s “Boys Behind Glass”
This digressive style reminded me of a medievalist’s lecture I recently caught by accident—slipping into a nearly empty lecture hall, an unplanned digression of my own time. He was talking about the digressions in Beowulf, moments when the poem veers…
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The Radical Joy of Being (Out) On the Road
Queer joy is something this book gives appropriately vast space to.
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Horror as a Crucible for Connection in Zefyr Lisowski’s “Uncanny Valley Girls”
Horror is a genre of solitude
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A Poetics of Water: Maya Salameh’s “Mermaid Theory”
It is this “shock,” this consistent disintegration, and the techniques necessary to stall it, that Maya Salameh so tenderly and precisely metabolizes on the page. Water is our earliest teacher, and Salameh shapes language like it. Salameh’s lyric feels familiar:…