Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
Reviews
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Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
Rooted to the Earth: The Carrying by Ada Limón
Limón’s ability to express her speaker’s connection to the earth, her desire to bring forth life in all its forms, is breathtaking.
War Games: Kill Class by Nomi Stone
What happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
When Our Inner Voices Speak: Reema Zaman’s I Am Yours
Reema’s book teems with gorgeous metaphors.
Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer, and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
Closing the Loop: Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter
I am mother. I am child. I am mother. The overlapping, hard-won truth—victim either way, saved either way.
Peripheral Terror: Total Recall by Samantha Giles
There is horror in how a memory can be altered or rendered “false” by exterior forces.
Leaving a Record: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive
How does what we choose to document dictate whose lives matter?
Delicious Courage: Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence
Melnick’s craft is in the extreme language and unfamiliar syntax which blends a brew that, while bitter, is also intoxicating.
Both/And: Republic Café by David Biespiel
How is one to make sense of making catastrophe and making love in the same moment?
Through the Translator’s Lens: Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough’s Objects of Affection
For Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, language provides a stronger connection with the past than nationality alone.