The Wildness of Grief: Sarah Giragosian’s Mother Octopus
...mothering is entwined with dying throughout this wide-ranging volume, as birth and death are revealed as two sides of one leaf.
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LittlePuss Press Double Release: On Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event: An Essay & Anton Solomonik’s Realistic Fiction
If the LittlePuss books are advanced exercises in cognitive dissonance, Blaxell and Solomonik insist on returning to matters of the heart.
Past is Prelude: Denne Michele Norris’s When The Harvest Comes
Norris’s ability to create interlocking portraits of flawed but somehow still lovable characters is one of her masterful offerings.
“A black sheet between present and ancestors”: Kiran Bath’s Instructions for Banno
It is as if we are falling backward, towards the sky, towards the structural silencing of bannos, and Bath’s words wrap around us like curled balloon string and lead us back toward the ground.
The Relentless Impressionism of Immigration: Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training
Sunder’s impressionistic lens also reveals that, perhaps, only in stepping back from intense initiations into new spaces can we see them clearly.
Shape Shifting: Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters
Lipson’s ability to do both with precision and compassion, often within the span of a single essay, will touch readers who are mothers, but also readers like me—and like all of us—who know what it is to have a mother.
We Can and Should Go Home Again: Raye Hendrix’s What Good is Heaven
These poems feel grainy with rich texture, like sinking your hands into the soil, the way it stays between your fingers all day if you don’t scrub your hands clean.
Pawn or Perpetrator: Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally
Younis, given her expertise in Iraqi politics and international affairs, offers welcome insight into a realm that is often only shown in snippets on the news.
“even as we all crowd the same body”: On Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa
To read Tetra Nova is to lean into nonlinear disorientation, flipping pages back and forth across time, scribbling in the margins of Vietnamese history.
Meaning in the Mundane: A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful
Loss and loneliness might be ubiquitous, but Greene reminds us of their infinite manifestations, each with a specificity so intimate we feel it like a punch to the gut.
Rich Kids Want to Die Too: Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized
...[BERLIN ATOMIZED is] about the internal and external chaos of growing up during globalization in an exploding, rootless world—one in which young people can’t tell who they are.
“stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.