Reviews

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Daydreams of Blackness: Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

• Georgie Fehringer
• October 18, 2022

Scodellaro’s characters have autonomy, know their comforts and desires, and find space and safety in the corners of forgotten places. They grieve on countertops, chewing ice and waiting for the return of a lover who has left for another.

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Far from Usual and Better for It: The Layered Poetics of Allison Blevins’s Slowly/Suddenly

• Julie Marie Wade
• October 12, 2022

Slowly/Suddenly is presented as a diptych in the Table of Contents, perhaps mirroring Blevins’s commitments to other forms of art, but her poems’ progression from Part I to Part II is not a linear narrative, not a Before & After.

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Take a Good Look: Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover

• Hannah Bonner
• October 11, 2022

"Crystal" was really her name. She was always as gentle as she could be. I am grateful to her for that.

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How the World Happens to Us: Lucy Ives’ Life Is Everywhere

• James Webster
• October 4, 2022

Lucy Ives has proven herself to be one of our greatest under-the-radar geniuses, but an achievement like Life Is Everywhere demands attention. The systems have long been in place, but everyone will see them now.

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Escaping the Infinite: An Omnibus Review of Four Contemporary Works of Poetry

• Z.L. Nickels
• September 28, 2022

So everything should be very clear.

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Finding Land: Audrey Magee’s The Colony

• Ciara Brennan
• September 27, 2022

“When you look at the colonial system, one of the things they want to eradicate is the native language, because they don’t understand what’s going on and they can’t control it.”

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The Pastoral Novel in Chaos: Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency

• Lauren Collee
• September 20, 2022

. . . to witness the world is always to participate in it, to make choices about what to see and what to ignore, and also to be worked upon by forces of differing scales.

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Sketch Book Reviews: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

• Kateri Kramer
• September 16, 2022

EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING EARTH . . . is a quintessential Barry Lopez book. It is a clarion call to lovers of the earth, but one full of hope and optimism. This is exactly the kind of book we should all be reading right now.

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Love in and Loving Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons

• Julie Marie Wade
• September 14, 2022

If I didn’t already write poems, Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons would make me want to write them.

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The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra

• Amy Janiczek
• September 13, 2022

This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.

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Glimpses of Peace Only in Dreams: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees

• Susan Bernofsky
• September 6, 2022

There’s a war on, and Sergey Sergeyich is worried about his bees.

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A Collection of Hours: Look Here by Ana Kinsella

• Apoorva Tadepalli
• August 30, 2022

Reading about flânerie is a “useful” thing for me to do: useful for my career, for my scholarly ambitions. Actually partaking in flânerie is rarely useful in these ways

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