Features & Reviews
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Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
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“It All Came Back to My Illness”: A Conversation with April Gibson
Writing about illness is a way to push back against all the pathologizing and dismissiveness. It allowed me to be in charge of my own narrative.
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The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
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Intergenerational Epiphany: A Conversation with Margaret Juhae Lee
It’s now my favorite way to write—in community. There’s something safe about it, you feel held.
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It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
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I Had to Find a New Language: A Conversation with Anna Gazmarian
I wanted to write about faith in a way that people who are not Christian, or do not understand that worldview, could read and have a more nuanced approach to faith.
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Sketch Book Reviews: The Book of (More) Delights
Today’s delight: a flush of blooming forget-me-nots creating a blue blanket on the edge of my garden.
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Vanishing as a Way of Resistance: A Conversation with Saúl Hernández
My job as a write is to first witness, and then record. It would be an injustice to these poems if they were not written from a place of vulnerability and truth.
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A Horror That Cannot be Helped
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.
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Complicating Cancel Culture: A Conversation with Christine Ma-Kellams
Subconsciously, when writing my own work, I want to make sure that people understand how these characters became who they are.
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The First Book: Eddie Ahn
The themes in the book subsequently shaped the story’s chronology and created a different style of graphic storytelling, connecting my family’s history with my community work and service.
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Embodiment as a Sensorial Practice in Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature
Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies . . . lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone.