Reviews
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The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”
Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more…
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The Strangest Sky Home Lost and Found in Leo Boix’s “Southernmost: Sonnets”
In his latest collection of poetry, Boix ushers readers into the halls of his personal museum, inviting us to peer within and peruse the memories and artifacts carefully numbered and ordered into the rhymes and lines of sonnets
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The Lesbian Erotic Poem: Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein
Whereas queerness itself is the resistance to sexual oppression, queer poetry is an arm, an extension and realization of resistance enacted with language. Employing Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” means that a lesbian poem aimed…
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Jon Fosse and the Perils of Writing Without Intention
…Vaim’s light touch arrives as a breath of fresh air.
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo
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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…
