Any War, Every War: Checkpoint by David Albahari
Individual soldiers become a formless mass. War becomes an end in itself.
Reviews
2651 posts
Making Absence Present: Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira
Saudade is often translated as longing, and as with most translations, what gets left out matters.
Solidarity in Sickness: Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
There is something so incredibly comforting about the honesty in Huber’s voice.
A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn't windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
A Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
Undergirding all the truth about pain is the triumph that comes from having a heart like a window and a mouth like a cliff.
A Strange Liminal Space: George Abraham’s The Specimen’s Apology
Each formal experiment is a temporary hole into a new world that opens, then collapses, behind the reader.
A Gentle Reckoning: Blas Falconer’s Forgive the Body This Failure
If there is distance in this collection, it originates with our own discomfort with its subject matter.
A Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.
A Live Ember: Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made
Over time, Strickland’s lines themselves grow wild, less uniform in their patterns of indentation. Like root structures deep in the ground, they branch in many directions.