Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
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Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
Sketch Book Reviews: The Book of (More) Delights
Today's delight: a flush of blooming forget-me-nots creating a blue blanket on the edge of my garden.
A Horror That Cannot be Helped
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.
Embodiment as a Sensorial Practice in Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature
Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies . . . lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone.
Holding a Mirror to Realism in The Novices of Lerna
His fictional world, as presented in this novella, develops a split truth, one where narrative reality and absurdist abstraction hang in the balance.
Is this the Danish Girl, Interrupted? Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom
“Have you ever confused a dream with life?”
A Panoptical View of Slough: On Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering
Scattered with a sparse collection of the poet’s original sketches . . . the poems move through the slanted and repetitive months of the pandemic, bleeding into “self-digesting” seasons.
A Dance of One’s Own: Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera
The return of someone deceased is a common enough trope, but where it is normally horrific . . . Polek initially runs jolly with it.
So Foreign Yet So Familiar: Three Early Novels by Amit Chaudhuri
But Chaudhuri pays keen attention to these seemingly self-evident truths, articulating what we think we know but keep forgetting.