Unsettled Terrain: Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
If shame works by convincing us that we are bad, by pinning us into a definition of badness, then the poems in Rummage resist by refusing to be pinned at all.
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The Journey toward Elsewhere: Natalia Sylvester’s Everyone Knows You Go Home
Despite its supernatural beginning, Everyone Knows You Go Home is grounded in the kind of gritty realism lived by every immigrant in this country.
An Invisible World: Tomas Tranströmer’s The Half-Finished Heaven: Selected Poems (Expanded Edition)
The poem, [Tranströmer] seems to say, doesn’t have to carry every burden of its poet’s heart. It doesn’t need to speak out loud, either.
These Women Are Ready to Scream: Danielle Lazarin’s Back Talk
Lazarin has written her heart out chronicling the lives of recognizable girls and women as they come of age, find their footing and chart their path through life’s curves, on their own terms.
This Most Vulnerable of Houses: Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
These poems, poised at the intersections of the material, the metaphorical, and the spiritual, fold into and out of one another as their boundaries dissolve with question after question.
Uncovering Buried Roots: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
There are two ways to read Freshwater: there is the knowing and the unknowing.
Logic and Lack of Logic: Best American Experimental Writing 2016
A crucial part of what makes experimental writing fresh is the way sight works with what is said, whether the material is performed or read in silence.
On Unsteady Ground: the earthquake room by Davey Davis
[T]his is a book about the ways in which even our most intimate relationships can slip beyond our control, fracturing along barely perceptible fault lines.
Wide-Eyed and Awed: Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had so I drew it
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites.
A Source of Life: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
There’s a lot left unsaid between the women of Red Clocks; not even they know the extent to which they’re all connected.
Intentions, Inquiries, and Impossible Tasks: Jenny Molberg’s Marvels of the Invisible
We discover that each of these moments and stories is held to the boat’s body like a clew: tight; so much so as to be nearly indistinguishable from the whole.
Not a Single False Moment: I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
What makes this memoir so fine, so special, is not just the power of these brushes with death, but [O'Farrell's] examination of them.