Reviews
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Compendium, by Kristina Marie Darling
As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell the whole story. For unlike some experimental poetry, that shirks…
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The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, by Paul Russell
Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the same– someone always wins. There’s always a favorite, a golden…
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Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall
“It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” This the opening line of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, but isn’t it also the first line of all of our lives? Walkabout, first published in 1959, is a petite book…
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The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent…
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Texts on (Texts on) Art, by Joseph Masheck
Although he has been writing art criticism for the past four decades, and now stands on the more distinguished side of life, Joseph Masheck begins his new essay collection, Texts on (Texts on) Art, by introducing readers to his boyhood self.…
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Inmost, by Jessica Fisher
Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come…
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Aerogrammes by Tania James
Tania James follows her well-received debut novel, 2009’s Atlas of Unknowns, with Aerogrammes, a collection of nine short stories which delve into topics as variant as professional wrestling, chimpanzee adoption, and graphology (the study of handwriting). James’s stories are populated…
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Almost Never, by Daniel Sada
Sex is the first word and ironic driving force of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never. It is the activity the agronomist Demetrio Sordo decides upon to break up the monotony of nightly strolls, cups of coffee, and games of dominos. The only…
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Coming to That by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning’s Coming to That is a book full of imagination, creativity, and intellect.
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Between the Crackups, by Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range in tone; they are frustrated, sorrowful, sometimes funny, sometimes contemplative.…
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Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery by Bill Clegg
There is a moment in Junky in which a psychiatrist asks William Burroughs’ narrator why he needs narcotics. His answer is to get out of bed in the morning, to function – “I need it to stay alive.” Later, managing…
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Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans
Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors explained that these fit young men roving about in traditional…