Reviews
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Unearthing the Portrait of an Artist: A review of Brent Ameneyro’s “A Face Out of Clay”
The poet is not a singularity and is overwhelmingly in the world, among others, even when they are in a room with the windows shut to keep out the noise. Ameneyro’s most profound moments emerge when he shifts from singular…
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Scout Finch Will Outlive Us All: Harper Lee’s “The Land of Sweet Forever”
… there’s no new work here, only archives with a pretty cover
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Miracle of the Ordinary: A Review of Ada Limon’s “Startlement”
Ada’s storytelling can be painstakingly slow and suspenseful, weaving through multiple plots and timelines. But it never fails to engage.
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The Shackles of Crime: John J. Lennon’s “The Tragedy of True Crime”
There are more sides to a person than a prison sentence can reveal.
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The Object of Our Attention: Marisa Meltzer’s ‘It Girl’
…what is it? And can it explain why Birkin’s life is the one we are currently examining, when there are so many others out there who likewise deserve to be “at the center of [their] own narrative”?
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On Dante Alighieri’s ‘Paradiso,’ a new translation by Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante Allighieri’s Paradiso by Copper Canyon Press, 2025 displays the enduring power of this classic work of Western literature. For such an old text, a contemporary reader might be surprised by Paradiso’s continuing relevance. Dante…
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Pizza with Anarchies: “Be Gay Do Crime”: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos
The title is a slogan that’s been floating around a while: “Be gay. Do crime.” Or, “crimes,” plural, if you go from the graffiti credited with the slogan’s origin. It’s associated with anarchism.
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A Space of Her Own
Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make space for it. All of it. This is a big…
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Misperceptions, Assumptions, and Slurs: Jackie Domenus’s No Offense
Even when doing the work to figure ourselves out, even within the seemingly safest of spaces, we must grapple with how others contain and label us.
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A Summertime Swoon Tash Aw’s The South
The relationship helps Jay achieve a sense of selfhood that promises to outlast the usual parameters of a summer romance. In a sense, he’s coming out to himself.
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Contrast, Rumination, and Metamorphosis: Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster
As in her debut, Antigua heads off any feelings of confessional monotony by mixing her diary poems with an elegant variety of lesser confessional, more expositional poems.
