Reviews
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Yearning and Wandering: Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral
The earth is fertile ground for seeking one’s roots and connection to others.
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Queer Revisioning and Incomprehensibility: Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches
Imbler never fails to demonstrate that a different way of life is possible.
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It’s Not Cancel Culture, It’s Scam Culture: Jinwoo Chong’s Flux
“Can we separate the art from the artist?” If you’re like me, you’ve been in more than a few versions of this particular conversation. You could even, at this point in the post-MeToo era, write a MadLib of this conversation.…
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Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind
The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
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Languages Within A Language: Camilo José Cela’s The Hive
How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text?
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Holding On and Letting Go: Rebecca Aronson’s Anchor
Gravity is what tethers us to the earth and to those we love, but it is also what we are constantly trying to escape. Anchor is about both these states—the holding on and the letting go—and the tension between them.
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Artifacts of Adolescence: Curing Season by Kristine Langley Mahler
We lose track of things and people over time. But back then, they felt like everything.
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Finding Freedom in the Absurd: Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait
From Ball’s absurdist perspective, leaning into the world’s inherent purposelessness isn’t about embracing mortality. It’s about embracing complete obliteration.
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Another Oracle: Lynn Xu’s Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Light
Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world / I mean,” opens one of the collection’s signature center-justified poems,…
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Balancing the Heart and Mind: Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On
Which Side Are You On is a novel both of the heart and the mind: one that makes you think and question your perception of the world and your place in it, and feel deeply and fervently about what matters…
