Contrast, Rumination, and Metamorphosis: Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster
As in her debut, Antigua heads off any feelings of confessional monotony by mixing her diary poems with an elegant variety of lesser confessional, more expositional poems.
Reviews
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Why a Happy Ending Matters: A Review of John Vercher’s Novels
To appreciate John Vercher’s complete oeuvre of fiction, we have to appreciate what has remained throughout his work and what has shifted.
“Three Initiates”: On Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L
When Thornton’s characters’ lives on and off screen drastically diverge, A/S/L not only satisfies nostalgia, but catapults the narrative to a whole new level.
Sacred Mire and the Cutting Edge of Anti-: Tawahum Bige’s Cut to Fortress
Bige as an in-your-face activist-poet resists the colonizer through a poetry they themselves appropriate and transform mainly via language play and voice into an indigenous poetry of personal redemption.
Little by Little: Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia
...disability will likely affect everyone in one way or another as they age—which is why regressive policies, revoked support, and limited accessibility are personal issues for us all.
We Must All Transition: Paul B. Preciado’s Dysphoria Mundi
Here we see dysphoria’s root: not an internal mental imbalance but external injustice and material harm caused by systems of hierarchy and domination.
Unfun: Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both
There’s a temptation to look for narrative redemption, a sense of completeness, some reassurance that the trouble was worthwhile, that all will be okay.
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.
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.