Scientific, Healing Magic: How to Know the Flowers by Jessica Smith
A poem by Jessica Smith yields the feeling that atoms of meaning vibrate, then come together.
Reviews
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Agency and Wonder: Amina Cain’s Indelicacy
To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind.
Both Reckoning and Embrace: Dorianne Laux’s Only As The Day Is Long
As the book continues, [Laux] traces a growing understanding of loss.
Paying Attention: Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not Into the Blossoms and Not Into the Air
Looking can be a way to honor, a way to pay our respects.
A Divine Comedy of Experience: Hannah Ensor’s Love Dream with Television
Art is a fickle running buddy, legacy jumps out unexpectedly, and love is too serious not to joke about.
Food in Times of Need: Eat Joy edited by Natalie Eve Garrett
This book begs to be flipped through and read with leisure.
A Kind of Bliss: Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
In these moments, we are there with her, to witness the work of staying sane.
A Gripping, Limited Call to Arms: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
There are so many happy endings that dystopia and utopia become almost indistinguishable by the novel’s end.
Living the Unknown: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House
I needed this book. Maybe you will, too.
Colonialism as Alien Invasion: Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson
What if the arrival of alien life wasn’t the future, but just another recapitulation of our bloody past?
A Metaphysical Inquiry: Nick Laird’s Feel Free
The work maintains a wondering backward, as it were, tracing the varied details of lived experience.
A Story of Memory: Machine by Susan Steinberg
The narrator is trapped here, in the summer her family and her life fell apart.