Sketch book Reviews: Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
An illustrated review of TIME IS A MOTHER by Ocean Vuong.
Reviews
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On the Mystery of Eating Meat: Springer Mountain by Wyatt Williams
If you eat meat, then you are an animal who kills other animals. Humans are not alone in this, but more than all other creatures of the earth, we have gotten grotesquely good at it.
Reading Achy Obejas’s BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN as Indelible and Recursive Testimony
A review of BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN, a bilingual poetry collection from Achy Obejas available now from Beacon Press.
A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts
The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.
The Scent of Man: Cameron MacKenzie’s River Weather
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
“Yes” as Signature and Grounding: Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing
In this experience of oneness . . . Emerson invites comparisons to mystic poets. And like them, Emerson breaks from her singular experience to take on some of life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist?
A Guidebook for Liminal Times: Martin Shaw’s Smoke Hole
These are liminal times. You must have this book at your side.
To Become A Kind Person Who Also Writes Books: Body Work by Melissa Febos
The ethics of Body Work are not necessarily that we writers and lovers must achieve perfect consistency between our behaviors (shopping at Sephora) and our politics (beauty standards are harmful), or between our desires (to be rewarded, both intangibly and commercially, for our adherence to dominant culture) and our values (to resist that dominance).
At the Crossing Between Words: Migrant Psalms by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
The actor stares the audience in the eye—shattering the fourth wall, and we’re implored to see better. Holnes challenges us to view our realities as multifaceted and dynamic—there are no neat boxes, no easy definitions.
Apocalypse Yesterday: Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes
The Membranes is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster.
A Dreamscape of Longing: Two Big Differences by Ian Ross Singleton
Zina’s observations of her time in Detroit crystallize both a feeling of otherness and a wry critique of the young American activists who celebrated socialist ideas without fully appreciating the legacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine.