Reviews
2651 posts
Justice by Seeing: Of Color by Jaswinder Bolina
But perhaps it is our want for firm ground that Bolina is challenging.
What We Need: Juan Felipe Herrera, Maw Shein Win, and John Freeman
Barbara Berman reviews Every Day We Get More Illegal, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, and The Park.
Learning to Be Haunted: Dennis James Sweeney’s Ghost/Home
We make a home, in other words, by letting in our ghosts.
Any Moment Is a Door: Nadia Colburn’s The High Shelf
Again, the red door stands open, allowing the world to enter.
Brief Moments Upon the Blank Page: Moyra Davey’s Index Cards
The collection enacts—even performs—its own coming into being.
Beloved Names and Incantatory Powers: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s The Inheritance of Haunting
And so it is an exorcism, yes, but also a song.
The Cost of Liberation: Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Patsy’s imagined freedom in America, she discovers almost immediately, was an illusion.
The Sound of Beginning: Birthright by George Abraham
These poems present a challenge to the typically imposed strictures of ownership, narrative, and solution.
Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell
This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.
The World Is on Fire: Living Weapon by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
A democratic art, the poet says, will take us through. Come November, vote.
The Privilege of Anxiety: Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse
What does our “future-dread,” as O’Connell puts it, show us about our own lives in the present?