Reviews
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I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different from Yau’s.
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The Greatest Show
In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of 1944.
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Held Together By Sinews
Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.
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A History of Potential
In his new history of the experimental writing movement, Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels, Daniel Levin Becker goes where few have gone.
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From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel throws us into a complex world of a young Filipino immigrant who is unexpectedly detained by Homeland Security.
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A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.
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This is Real
With dream-like language, Miranda Mellis’s latest book, None of This is Real, gives us a fantastical world with a haunting resemblance to our own.
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Unless You Land in Dhaka
Ahmed’s roots construct a more nuanced Americana, as we follow Ahmed through the industrial American cities where she calls herself citizen (read: “free”), to her always-estranged returns to Dhaka.
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We Were Kids
In English for the first time, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories retrace timeless youthful abandon with mature yet doleful emotional detachment.
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TSFN
With an experiment in form, Mark Leyner’s latest novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack turns the exploits of a nobody into the stuff of whacked-out folklore.
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I Have a Jaw That Seeks Chunks
In Melissa Broder’s second collection, Meat Heart, there is a burgeoning tension between the spiritual life of the imagination and its blood and guts container—the forehead, the hips, the heart—that is both dire and light. At the core of these…
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The Body Place Is a Thinking Place
From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.