Reviews
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Wanting Light and Buying Hammers
Even the hardest books ultimately cohere, it’s just a matter of whether their internal logic will eventually open up and allow you entrance. Lily Brown’s Rust or Go Missing is such a book.
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Down from Cascom Mountain
Ann Joslin Williams’ first novel, Down from Cascom Mountain, follows troubled young people in an idyllic lodge in New Hampshire for one summer.
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The Octopi and the Flaking Salt
The Grief Performance took me to the edge of an existential black hole, then threw me back on the concrete and said, “Bitch, please. This is theater.”
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When the Stonecutter’s Work is Done
Be warned: Char demands much from his reader. His poetry seems to exist in a limbo, where emotion and intellect meet with startling results. His labyrinthine vision leads the reader into a universe where everything seems transformed.
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Life on Sandpaper
Yoram Kaniuk’s autobiographical novel Life on Sandpaper follows the Israeli writer through his galavanting in 1950s Greenwich Village.
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Monster Party
Lizzy Acker’s first book of stories Monster Party depicts lost adults, drifting into the coming storm.
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My Stupid Dollar, My Beautiful Soul
When reading Space, in Chains, I would command my sister, my mother, my friends: “listen to this poem.” I recited Kasischke’s poetry out loud at the dinner table; I scanned her words as subways hurtled beneath boroughs; I listened to…
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Long Drive Home
Will Alllion’s second novel Long Drive Home examines how one quick decision shapes a young father’s life.
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The Speed of Belief
We don’t always run a separate review of our Poetry Book Club selection, but you’re in luck here. Taylor Hagood takes us through Tracy K. Smith’s latest, Life on Mars.
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Zazen
Beautiful language builds the captivating apocalyptic world in Vanessa Veselka’s debut Zazen, the first title from new publisher Red Lemonade.
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The Hokum of Her Clothes
[O]ne of Laux’s strengths is her willingness to break through those poetic walls so many of us construct. She seems to want no distance between herself and her reader.
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In This Light
In This Light, a collection of Melanie Rae Thon’s short stories, shows the writer’s shifts in the last twenty years, while reminding us of her powerful, haunting storytelling.