Reviews
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Learning to Grow Where Planted: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones
Part of looking closer is seeing what is hard to face, and part of having courage is addressing what seems futile.
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Mothering Our Children and Ourselves: Molly Caro May’s Body Full of Stars
As May moves through what she now calls her “postpartum challenge,” she does not return to her old self, but instead becomes someone new.
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A Book with Wings: Bird Book by Sidney Wade
There is an acceptance of the strangeness of things in these poems, even a generosity big enough to invite the oracle in for dinner.
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They’re No Soldiers: Ryan McIlvain’s The Radicals
The Radicals is the coming-of-age novel at its darkest: all the lessons are learned too late, if at all.
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The Depths We Don’t Have Words For: Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Echolocation
[R]eading these poems feels like looking down into deep water, being able to see only so far and no farther.
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To Choose Music: Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble
The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit.
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Both Insider and Outsider: Victoria Chang’s Barbie Chang
Barbie Chang is an intelligent, lively portrayal of the pressures on contemporary women (especially mothers), and a breathlessly entertaining read.
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A Myth of Her Own Making: The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again.
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Faith and Identity: Fireworks in the Graveyard by Joy Ladin
To “ameliorate” the desire for death or the sense of self-annihilation, Ladin finds in religion a way of reconciliation, not only within herself, but also with her community and society at large.
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Concealed Histories: Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart
America is Not the Heart offers Filipinx-Americans the gratification of being seen, and a way of seeing.
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Nesting Dolls: Julie Carr’s Objects from a Borrowed Confession
Would you say poetry, for you, is the vessel which houses all other forms? I would say it is for me.
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A Heart-Centered Engagement: Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thompson-Spires illustrate[s] the psychic traps set when myths take precedence over lived experience, when “the monstrous head deforms the face.”