Reviews
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I Remember a Black Fog
Cedar Sigo avoids the usual pitfalls when exploring queer identity, minority identity and a political perspective thinking progressives can work with. He isn’t trite. He is never overwrought, and he brings a kinetic ardor to every line.
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The Diviner’s Tale
Morrow’s supple prose is grounded in lyricism, prose unafraid to give the reader both the forest and the trees. Bradford Morrow’s new novel, a feminist interpretation of fairy-tale tropes, explores the life of Cassandra: single-mother, teacher, dowser.
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The Air in the Cages is Dust
One of the great strengths of this book is Flynn’s refusal to luxuriate in self-importance. Instead, he displays a consistent awareness that the poetry of war is not war itself, but dwells in the incorporeal rather than the actual.
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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.
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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 frankness.
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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, empathic, curious, responsive. In short: what it feels like to…
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All in the Family
Ellen Meeropol’s debut novel tackles bizarre cult rituals, political violence, drug abuse, infanticide, and the Klan.
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Russian Winter
In this “magnificent” first novel, an aging ballerina looks back on life, betrayal, and loss in the former Soviet Union.
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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 her intent in writing her poems.
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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.”
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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.
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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.