When Ideals Meet Reality: The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow
You want to live by your ideals, but it’s hard to make them align with reality.
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A Language for Extinction: Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds
And if you ask of her to come to you, her answer is refusal.
Haunted by Hoax: Paul Griner’s The Book of Otto and Liam
But Griner is too skilled a realist to allow The Book of Otto and Liam to become a simple revenge story.
The Violent and the Sensual: original kink by Jubi Arriola-Headley
Violence can be turned around, turned into pleasure, or an act of freedom, or an act of defiance.
The Inescapability of Motherhood: Makenna Goodman’s The Shame
When the novel begins, Alma is in the car, speeding away from her life.
In and of the Wreck: Together in a Sudden Strangeness
In its imagery and mood, the collection feels distinctly April.
Possibility Is Spellbinding: The Lightness by Emily Temple
In short, lightness is the capacity to leave without regret.
The Fluidity of Language and Identity: Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland
When was the first time you remember seeing yourself in a book you were reading?
Reading the Landscape of the Past: Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest
Learning to read a landscape can reveal a deep history.
The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems
These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.
Pushing a Universe through a Keyhole: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
Still, Smith’s sadness does not serve to disintegrate her zeal for living.
Interrogating Language: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures
Language enacts violence through manipulation.