Reviews
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A Utopia of One’s Own: Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
. . . utopia is a living, breathing, imperfect thing that expands and grows with us. It’s always a reflection of our individual selves, of the larger communities we choose, and of the time and place we are born into.
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Perfectly Made and Frighteningly Fragile: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris
We must learn to see the divine even in our sorrow
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“Do You Hearest?”: A Review of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon, tr. Rebekah Smith
Where are you, Susana Thénon?—which I think might mean: How does Thénon achieve something more than evasion and isolation with all of this wandering around? Does she land somewhere?—“In a room where if I am I’m not or I am…
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No Way to Avoid Things Mattering: A Dream Life by Claire Messud
The placement of a marquee tent at a party or the tension between the caterer and a housekeeper take on outsized importance.
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Sketch book Reviews: Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
An illustrated review of TIME IS A MOTHER by Ocean Vuong.
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On the Mystery of Eating Meat: Springer Mountain by Wyatt Williams
If you eat meat, then you are an animal who kills other animals. Humans are not alone in this, but more than all other creatures of the earth, we have gotten grotesquely good at it.
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Reading Achy Obejas’s BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN as Indelible and Recursive Testimony
A review of BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN, a bilingual poetry collection from Achy Obejas available now from Beacon Press.
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A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on…
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When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts
The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.
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The Scent of Man: Cameron MacKenzie’s River Weather
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
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“Yes” as Signature and Grounding: Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing
In this experience of oneness . . . Emerson invites comparisons to mystic poets. And like them, Emerson breaks from her singular experience to take on some of life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do…
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A Guidebook for Liminal Times: Martin Shaw’s Smoke Hole
These are liminal times. You must have this book at your side.