Like an Amputee’s Phantom Itch
Whether you’re an admirer or a stranger to her work, Rachel McKibbens awakens and haunts with selfless honesty.
Reviews
2642 posts
The Whole World Clanked Like an Iron Shovel
The horror of watching the self separate from the self—the schism of self-awareness—it’s almost vertigo-inducing. Kocot’s gift as a poet is being able to explain such complexity with such uncompromised…
Of Course They’re Staring
The poems in The Book of Frank capture moments, and they don’t explain themselves. But, cumulatively, they invoke a sense of what it is like to be almost supernaturally sensitive,…
All in the Family
Ellen Meeropol’s debut novel tackles bizarre cult rituals, political violence, drug abuse, infanticide, and the Klan.
Russian Winter
In this “magnificent” first novel, an aging ballerina looks back on life, betrayal, and loss in the former Soviet Union.
A Conversation So Imperfectly Understood
Rosanna Warren’s tautly elegant poetry in her collection Ghost in a Red Hat captivates me. Warren does not aim for obscure language and obstructed meaning; she carefully and clearly reveals…
The Fates Will Find Their Way
“It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.”
Have Gun, Will Travel
Deb Olin Unferth’s ruefully funny memoir revisits the year she followed her boyfriend into the war zones of Latin America.
Glass Is Really a Liquid
The hard thing about these poems is that they make sense, fundamentally, but they’ve got a strange, skittering-away sense to them, a resistance to being pinned down.
Until There Is No Next Thing
Imagination is not simply a bulwark in Cradle Book; it is a means through which Teicher actively transcends the blight suffered throughout the work.
Fission Accomplished
A collection of linked stories set at Fort Hood convey the loneliness and strain experienced by military families.
I Felt a Need to Touch Someone
An aspiring writer’s memoir of September 11 focuses on the strangeness of life in New York City before and after the attack.