Reviews
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All the Whiskey in Heaven
In short, [Charles] Bernstein is taking apart the structures of conventional poetry, and more generally of the language we use every day – and which in turn uses us – in order to return us to a more basic relationship…
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Herself, Only Reversed
The Hollywood dreams of this novel’s heroine are much like the tenets of her fundamentalist upbringing: first sacrifice, then redemption, then apocalyptic paradise.
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The Queen of Flash Fiction
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the…
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The Private Lives of Trees
The second novella by Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, one of the “Bogotá 39” influential Latin American writers, uses metafiction to tell a delicate, emotionally complex story.
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Time Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the watching future-self unable to keep her from finding the closet…
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O Fallen Angel
The tale of a bipolar, Midwestern prostitute and her Catholic family feels all-too-familiar to our Midwest-born reviewer.
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I Was the Jukebox
Sandra Beasley’s crisp images and multiplicities galore construct an enlivened world for her reader, bringing what Gregory Orr calls, “authority of imagination…” Each poem is an experiment that recreates from the codex of language a powerful brand of imagination.
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What He’s Poised to Do
A new collection of stories by New Yorker staff writer Ben Greenman moves from Chicago to North Africa to… the moon.
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Boys and Girls Like You and Me
“The earth was crowded with people who would never try to find me if I disappeared. A person is missing only if another person misses them.”
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Ether
No, Beatty! Don’t start telling your English teacher about your essay on Pope when he has his fingers in your knickers!
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How to Catch a Falling Knife
It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title performs: instead of shying from danger, these poems surprise by…
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Simplify Me When I’m Dead
Keith Douglas has largely ceased to exist to most readers beyond those attracted to war as a subject. The reissue of Simplify Me When I’m Dead, containing forty-one poems, aims to correct that.