Reviews
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Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler
Betsy Wheeler’s Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room has sort of undone me for the month and a half I’ve spent with it, reading it or letting it hang over to the side and reverbrate while I try ways through…
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“Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia,” by José Manuel Prieto
In 1988, Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a personal dictionary of his “key words, problem words, words I love.” Not your average lexicon, “Sixty-three words” fuses history, philosophy, social-critique and autobiography, ingeniously invigorating a literary form often lumped with the…
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“Love Is a Canoe,” by Ben Schrank
“Love and marriage,” says the song, “go together like a horse and carriage.” Or do they? In his latest novel, Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank casts a critical eye at this age-old assumption. Love’s quick current can carry a…
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My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
In age of poetry saturated with the irony and airy nonsense of the last phalanx of the grandchildren of the New York School, it is wonderfully refreshing to read Tanya Larkin’s poems in My Scarlet Ways. She uses a refreshing…
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Now Make an Altar by Amy Beeder
In Amy Beeder’s poetry, we are surrounded by the refuse and remains of the past: memories and photos of lost generations, the bones and fur of animals used to adorn ourselves, the smell of fallow plants. Her second collection of…
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“Beamish Boy (I Am Not My Story): A Memoir of Recovery & Awakening,” by Albert Flynn DeSilver
The story of an artist’s search for identity, Beamish Boy opens with that classic trinity of WASP dysfunction: old money, alcohol abuse, and remote parents. The author’s earliest memories conjure a grotesque modern fairy tale of growing up in a…
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In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful,…
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“Descanso for My Father,” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Like the dreamlike shadowboxes of Joseph Cornell, Fletcher assembles scraps of imagery and inherited keepsakes into an enchanting quest to understand his family’s stories. Yet the abundant images with which Fletcher crafts his essays serve best as they buttress the…
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“Summer of Hate,” by Chris Kraus
It’s appropriate to read Chris Kraus’s Summer of Hate in the middle of the winter. The novel is perfect for January and February, being very fast moving and set in warm places. And we, bombarded as we are this time…
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Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
Marisa Siegel reviews Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Periodicity by Iris A. Law
Iris A. Law’s fearless debut work, Periodicity, operates through a unique structural conceit that lushly unfolds across the arc of the chapbook: each poem takes as its subject matter a woman who was intimately connected with the world of science.…
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Wikipedia Says It Will Pass by Diana Salier
Wikipedia is not to be trusted, at least not entirely. We all know this. (For a brief period in August of 2009 the first sentence of the “Trees” poet—“Poems are made by fools like me/ But only God can make…