The Illusion of Wholeness: Sophie Collins’s Who is Mary Sue?
When reading this book, expect your notions of speaker—and even what a book of poetry is—to be challenged.
...more
Reviews
Unsung Choices: Blue Rose by Carol Muske-Dukes
Can women ever fully escape the restrictions upon them, the risk to their bodies that comes from being born female?
...more
Raising the Dead: Claudia Castro Luna’s Killing Marías
The poems in Killing Marías sustain a deep reverence for women and are a call to action for the world.
...more
A Subjective Magic: Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between
Boully splays open her own torso and readers divine what they need to from the spill of her organs.
...more
Reclamation, Reassembly, and Recognition: Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e
What happens when the source of grief comes from within?
...more
Subtle Magic: Starfish by Sara Goodman
This book is a map, Dear Reader. And you are here.
...more
A Healing Exploration: Micah Perks’s True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape
Stories are the miracle, and the escape, promised by the book’s title.
...more
Revolutionary Anger: Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad
The most important idea within the book is that our anger, in all its shapes, is justified.
...more
The Fraught Business of Identity: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know
All You Can Ever Know insists that the stories we use to understand ourselves should be allowed as much complexity as the truth dictates.
...more
An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
...more
Unglued from Time: Shahriar Mandanipour’s Moon Brow
An enjoyable and thought-provoking read, Moon Brow trades on its striking and unusual formal features to allude to the complexities and consequences of war.
...more
A Thin-Bladed Grace: Kristin Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies
Each luminous metaphor lays claim over sadness or violence, remaking it.
...more
A Sense of God: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
Perhaps one of the most beautiful things Moore does is to give voice to those who would not or did not have a voice.
...more
Personal to Universal: Robin Becker’s The Black Bear Inside Me
Becker stands firmly on the shoulder of earlier lesbian-feminist poets while inhabiting and describing our current era of new challenges and old shibboleths.
...more
Straddling the Divide: Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States
The entire collection is suffused by an aching awareness of absence and an obsession with the indelible markings of the past.
...more
New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
...more
Twenty Years of Miseducation: Joan Morgan’s She Begat This
Morgan has a lot of gaps to fill—and a lot of traps to potentially fall into.
...more
Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
...more
My Nebraska is Only One Nebraska: Erica Trabold’s Five Plots
Five Plots wades into the enigmatic relationships between family and memory, where truth is seemingly as placid as the Platte River but re-examination causes a re-route.
...more
Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
...more
This Peculiar Burden: Wesley Yang’s The Souls of Yellow Folk
Yang boasts an admirable track record in publishing on a variety of subjects, but a highlight reel does not a cohesive collection make.
...more
Obsession and Impulse: Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights
The words act as a push, like a wind at your back.
...more
Terrible Beauty: Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
…in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.
...more
A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
...more
Form as Container: Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets
Zighelboim almost has to break the form into pieces in order to speak; a fourteen-word poem is really only the echo of a sonnet.
...more
Hard to Swallow: Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls
Jell-O, that seemingly innocuous, gem-colored dessert, has a darker history than one might expect.
...more
Three Strong Women: Lisa Rosenberg, Maw Shein Win, and Libby Burton
Welcome all three of these books with enthusiasm for what they do, and with shared possibilities for the ”craved world.”
...more
Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
...more
Beyond Beowulf: Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife
In this novel, the women control everything.
...more
A Legacy of Wisdom: The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Is death a miracle or destruction?
...more