Reviews
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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.
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Twin Cities by Carol Muske Dukes
Muske-Dukes’s book seems the perfect read for this time of year when the year is winding down, yet life is still rumbling forward.
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On Pointe, and in Limbo
Martha Schabas’ Various Positions is an excellent novel about performance anxiety and sexual development disguised as a young adult novel.
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The Glory of the Sunken
Set in a profane and beautiful world of uncertain values—a world that resembles ours but is in fact post-World War I Bucovina—Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol is a delight.
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They Sing Wild Songs In New Keys
Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue.
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Perceptive and Prophetic
Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight.