Reviews
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To the Language of Doves
Darwish’s identity (and the Palestinian identity) has been, at least partly, developed in exile. Darwish writes: “I am absence./ The heavenly and the expelled.” Here he speaks not only for himself, but for his people.
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Emerging Empathy
In The Chairs Are Where the People Go, Shelia Heti and Misha Glouberman explore all topics that Glouberman cares about, including feeling like a fraud, seeing John Zorn play Cobra, and asking a good question.
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Slashed Narcissi, Drilled Stone
In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger.
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Kids Kill Art or Art Kills Kids
With a unique family led by performance artist parents, Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang warns of the dangers of conflating art and life.
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The Cows in The Cows
Lydia Davis’s new chapbook The Cows documents the lives of her neighbor’s cows.
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More Horses Than We Need
Perspective and introspection are plentiful in this fine retrospective collection, but Gallagher doesn’t fully see now. She speculates profoundly and eloquently, metaphysically — never astro/quantum physically, as if from any century — but our own.
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Hello, Happy Homeland
Ana Menendez’s new collection of short fiction, Adios, Happy Homeland, weaves together stories from diverse Cuban voices that all confront the history and lived reality of their conflicted homeland.
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A Journey With Two Maps
Becoming a Woman Poet is brisk, each indicator of geography reinforcing the urge to break barriers.
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By Any Other Name
Like Freedom, Keith Scribner’s third book, The Oregon Experiment, is hugely ambitious, decidedly modern, distinctly American novel, with complicated family dynamics, and remarkable depth of character and psychological nuance.
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Their Eyes Like Geodes
In She Returns to the Floating World, Gailey utilizes anime and other aspects of Japanese culture, such as its folklore and attitudes following The Bomb, as she puzzles through how to define “she.”
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Populist Fatalism
In his new epistolary novel, Dignity, about a new community founded in the unpaved cul-de-sacs and abandoned unfinished houses of the California desert, Ken Layne criticizes the material obsessions of contemporary capitalism.
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A Box, or Paradox, A Language Game
Tesser’s chapbook slips outside certainties, authorities, controls, leaving her reader-players loose to enact their own language game, re-encountering the inherent antic plasticity of words and meanings.