Reviews
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A Flower Too Often Smelt Will Wilt
This is a hybrid book that chronicles the real journey and imagines the surreal journey of Lewis and Clark, from watching a baseball game with President Jefferson and Ozzie Smith, to the narrator having a tree sprout from his penis,…
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The Faster I Walk
With a poignant sadness, a young Norwegian writer, Kjersti A. Skomsvold, tells the story of a lonely dying woman in her debut The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am.
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Thumbs In, Fingers Splayed
Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,” trying to reconcile, like any reasonable artist, the internal with…
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Varamo
César Aira’s Varamo reaffirms Aira’s place as seminal Latin American writer whose work wanders between bizarre situations and philosophical digressions.
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The Shape-Shifter
In his memoir, God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked, Darrell Hammond tells his story with a remarkable candor that seems designed not to shock or titillate, but to allow for a full and honest rendering of a scary…
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Trees Are Blooming Into Bright Lightbulbs
Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t mean you aren’t invited to into the strangeness, asked to…
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The Whole Vortex of Home
[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.
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Before and After
Sitting on the edge of the English language, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s new collection Apricot Jam and Other Stories pushes us into twentieth century Russia.
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We’ll Call Them Contact Zones
Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and memory, interrogating the urge to abstract, label, and catalogue suffering.
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In the Manner of Water or Light
So many of the voices in Ayiti are trapped in situations that are too difficult to bear, and yet they must.
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I Kid You Not the Rush Is Good
Be ready for thresholds, light and dark—in both natural and fluorescent hues—and for getting high.
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A Preposterous Proposal, But No, Not Quite
Helen DeWitt’s satirical novel Lightning Rods turns the quotidian American workplace into a cloaked prostitution ring and makes us wonder if it isn’t already one.