Reviews
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Body Odor Can Be a Room
In individual poems, small series of interconnected poems, and in the book as object, Mairéad Byrne has made in The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven a map that covers every kind of topographical feature.
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There Is No Other
Jonathan Papernick’s short story collection revolves around the trials and tribulations of “an unlucky persecuted tribe.”
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Something That Can Never Be Said with Words
The darkness in Jon Fosse’s work is that of human consciousness confronted with mortality. Yet his characters seem to radiate with a luminous urgency.
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Who’s There
In Knock Knock, Hartley has accomplished a humor hat-trick, netting jokes a) in poetry, b) while evoking multiple cultures and c) in multiple languages. Hartley’s comedy is in the absurdity of the details, whether sensory or linguistic.
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Celebration and Bitterness, Comfort and Dread
In Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway examines the ambiguities of the human heart, sometimes answering life’s dilemma’s too elegantly.
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Two Threads
Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems is best appreciated not for its message or its drama, but for its expert way at guiding a reader through the writer’s lively imagination.
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Fourth Down and Longing
A memoir of life as a disappointed fan becomes a meditation on “isolation and the things we do to overcome our loneliness… emptiness, and not knowing how to fill it.”
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Stumbling into Immensity
Ted Gilley’s short story collection, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, maps grief’s breathless journey from haunted to home safe.
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It Begins to Look Like Courtesy
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
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Triumph and Oblivion
José Saramago’s posthumous novel The Elephant’s Journey is an exploration of the self—and a gift to his readers.
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Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It instead feels rather gleeful.
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It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort…