Reviews
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“How to Survive a Hotel Fire” by Veronica Wong
The princess is not a poet, but we never forget that she is written by one, a very good one indeed.
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“Fobbit,” by David Abrams
“The real war is unlikely to be found in novels,” writes the late Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. He argues that novels are unlikely purveyors of wartime truth because on one…
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“Fakes,” by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer
Receipts, letters, diaries, grocery lists, photographs, report cards, online dating profiles – all these documents are written evidence of our existence. For most of us, they will be the only written evidence of our existence. Creating fraudulent documents as a…
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“Roleplay” by Juliana Gray
In Juliana Gray’s Roleplay, though the book has its share of formal verse – triolets, sonnets, etc – don’t be surprised if you run into a zombie or two. Roleplay contains, besides a zombie love poem, a series of poems…
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“The Polish Boxer,” by Eduardo Halfon
Eduardo Halfon is unsatisfied with something. So he decides to travel (or escape?) in attempt to discover what’s missing. His novel The Polish Boxer is a murky study on the influence of geography on a person’s desires.
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“The Children” by Paula Bohince
The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems Paula Bohince’s The Children (her second full-length collection) reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads. This collection reminds the reader that lyric’s static and…
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“Stories for Boys,” by Gregory Martin
Stories for Boys is Gregory Martin’s second memoir to examine the landscape of family. His first, Mountain City, maps his ties to a one-blink town in rural Nevada: the book is steady, spare, and clear-eyed. But the focus of this new…
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Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino
Ryan Teitman reviews Safe as Houses by Marie-Helen Bertino today in Rumpus Books.
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“The Fact of the Matter” by Sally Keith
In The Fact of the Matter, moments are artifacts to be labeled and sorted. The poems are not an attempt to make sense – of time, of history, and of the self and the self in and out of love…
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Love, In Theory by E. J. Levy
The protagonists in the nine stories that make up E.J. Levy’s Love, In Theory (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction) are almost all highly educated, the sort of people who quote Adorno to themselves during times of…
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“The Crossed Out Swastika” by Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells’ fifth collection of poems, The Crossed-Out Swastika, treads the familiar yet treacherous and muddy ground of World War II. For a less skilful poet, such hostile territory may have presented an insurmountable challenge. For Cassells’, however, the atrocities…
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NW by Zadie Smith
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. This is how Zadie Smith opens her latest novel, NW, and how appropriate–that something so fiery and core-hot, so screaming and universal could appear dumbfounded, loafing, stagnant. Meet North West London, a…