Finding Land: Audrey Magee’s The Colony
“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.”
Reviews
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The Pastoral Novel in Chaos: Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency
. . . 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.
Sketch Book Reviews: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
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.
Love in and Loving Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons
If I didn’t already write poems, Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons would make me want to write them.
The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
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.
Glimpses of Peace Only in Dreams: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees
There’s a war on, and Sergey Sergeyich is worried about his bees.
A Collection of Hours: Look Here by Ana Kinsella
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
“I Was Born to This Poetry”: The Book of Mirrors by Yun Wang
I hear the gossip of flowers / insatiable in their lust / Consider the cages that are our bodies
Sketch Book Reviews: Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead
THE BIRDS AND US, written by Tim Birkhead and released August 2022 from Princeton Review Press, is atheist perfect mix of history, narrative, and science with a dash of cool illustrations. Throughout the book, readers will learn about everything from bird cave paintings, to birdwatching, and everything in between.
A Sultry Register: Nichole Perkins’s Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be
In early May I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from author Nichole Perkins that piqued my interest. It was a sexy tweet—in a string of…
Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality
Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.