Lightning Rods and Line Breaks: The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed
Frighteningly detailed, this poet knows horror well.
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Reviews
The Fractures of Motherhood: Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House
Like Fine’s uniquely constructed book, being a mom is to be permanently fractured.
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There Are No Cheap Seats in Lauren Shapiro’s Arena
Resonance is a given. You can’t help but hear. In Lauren Shapiro’s Arena, every seat is the best seat in the house.
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Acts of Love: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Zauner’s memoir is not a performance, but an act of love, including all the dirty little bits that come with it.
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Both Microscope and Telescope: The Absurd Man by Major Jackson
The Absurd Man is confident and daring with a muscular specificity of language that is both deeply resonant for a wide audience and also singular to the poet.
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The More Painful Absence: Keema Waterfield’s Inside Passage
In this lush and raw account, musicians play, voices harmonize and then separate again, town after Alaska town rolls by… and Waterfield searches for home.
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Inner Conversations Projected on a Surface: Bruno K. Öijer’s The Trilogy
A family’s grief traps generations in a search for insight.
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The Isolation of Millennial Life: Ancco’s Nineteen
Nineteen is a book that’s by turns smart, sad, and scathing.
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The Revolutions of a Sonnet: frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
The richly historied form of the sonnet is a powerhouse for holding the past.
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How We Create Ourselves: Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The voice reaches and reaches at answers to broad questions. Sometimes it pulls back pieces of insight and beauty.
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Scrutinizing the Ties That Bind: Melissa Febos’s Girlhood
By the end of the collection, Febos has managed to rewrite or erase entirely many parts of the patriarchal script that held her bound.
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Child as Mother to the Woman: Catherine Gammon’s China Blue
In this book we are taken by all three: language, plot, character.
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The Past Is All We Have: André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis
Is it not in the warm chambers of the past, after all, that we are immortal, invincible, and alive?
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Panic Mode: The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld
Cyclical patterns of journalism notwithstanding, Gladstone sees this moment as uniquely concerning.
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Pockets of Belonging: Wandeka Gayle’s Motherland: And Other Stories
The characters of Motherland might be displaced, but they are never alone.
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Other Stories, Other Lives: Life among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks
By the time the television cameras arrive, the rest of the world may be surprised, but we’re not.
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To Set Asunder: The Separation and Synthesis of Tiana Nobile’s Cleave
A word becomes a reckoning, a reconciling of contradiction.
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The Reconstruction of Derrida: Peter Salmon’s An Event, Perhaps
The key insight is that names, and indeed all boundaries, involve a hierarchy.
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Unsettled Memories: First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
Author and narrator, fiction and memory, never settle comfortably into their proper places.
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Electric Synthesis: Drakkar Noir by Michael Chang
Chang’s style imitates internet culture and the patterns of an anxious mind. But there’s also glamour.
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Both of These Things Are True: Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
The frame expands. The structure collapses. The pieces are still speaking.
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Hauntings in the Kingdom of Money: Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel
There is an admiration, here, of the transitory soul.
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Word by Word, Brick by Brick: Christine Larusso’s There Will Be No More Daughters
In other words: Larusso does some remarkably heavy lifting in this book.
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A Love That Leaves Scars: With Teeth by Kristen Arnett
Reading Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth is like taking an afternoon drive down the I-4 of my memory.
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Both Trauma and Sin: Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa
Speak, Okinawa is masterful at describing the internal dissonance that mixed race children can feel.
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Exorcising Whiteness: Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat
Rae presents America as seen through Black girls’ eyes, experienced by our bodies.
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Illuminating the Darkness: Madeleine L’Engle’s The Moment of Tenderness
For anyone looking for some truth and tenderness amidst a still-trying time, look no further.
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Hell Is a Young Man: Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent
The brutality of frat culture, Nugent suggests, is a veneer that hardly masks its devotees’ miseries and insecurities.
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Depths of Story: Who’s Your Daddy by Arisa White
The inherited wounds cut so deep one wonders if they can ever be fully healed.
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The Plague within a Plague: Ethel Rohan’s In the Event of Contact
Rohan is masterful at mining these triads for their palpable uneasiness and unavoidable suffering.
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