Reviews
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The Fraught Business of Identity: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know
All You Can Ever Know insists that the stories we use to understand ourselves should be allowed as much complexity as the truth dictates.
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An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
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Unglued from Time: Shahriar Mandanipour’s Moon Brow
An enjoyable and thought-provoking read, Moon Brow trades on its striking and unusual formal features to allude to the complexities and consequences of war.
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A Thin-Bladed Grace: Kristin Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies
Each luminous metaphor lays claim over sadness or violence, remaking it.
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A Sense of God: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
Perhaps one of the most beautiful things Moore does is to give voice to those who would not or did not have a voice.
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Personal to Universal: Robin Becker’s The Black Bear Inside Me
Becker stands firmly on the shoulder of earlier lesbian-feminist poets while inhabiting and describing our current era of new challenges and old shibboleths.
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Straddling the Divide: Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States
The entire collection is suffused by an aching awareness of absence and an obsession with the indelible markings of the past.
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New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
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Twenty Years of Miseducation: Joan Morgan’s She Begat This
Morgan has a lot of gaps to fill—and a lot of traps to potentially fall into.
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Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
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My Nebraska is Only One Nebraska: Erica Trabold’s Five Plots
Five Plots wades into the enigmatic relationships between family and memory, where truth is seemingly as placid as the Platte River but re-examination causes a re-route.
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Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.