Reviews
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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.
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Broad As the Mouth of the Hudson
In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book about religion in America, Sweet Heaven When I Die, “religion” is something protean and heterodox.
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Envy Never Sleeps
As if to heed Hecate’s rebuke, to show the dire glory of her art, Szporluk’s poems speak with a voice unhinged by an unyielding despair. Teeming with submerged violence and opaque anger, they swirl, futile, in the face of our…
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Anxiety Bombs
In her debut novel, Threats, Amelia Gray is coy about plot in deference to the beauty and urgency of people’s thoughts.
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Plenty Worth Saying, With Very Few Words
Kevin Moffett’s Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is one of the most delightful collections in recent memory.
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Met a Lunatic on Craigslist
But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I want to overhear conversations on the streets.
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Modern Retellings
The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Death Comes to Pemberly both attempt to pay homage to nineteenth century novelists, but the translation is not always apt.