Reviews Archives - Page 49 of 219

You’re in the Hands of a Pro: The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot by Jack Driscoll

The characters in this collection frequently daydream about time. Children and teens want to speed it up so life can start. Grown-ups ask time to slow, or rewind to get some of it back.

Read

Read

Imagination Is Like Grace: Meghan O’Rourke’s Sun in Days

A poem doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but a memory has a touch of immortality: it’s a sort of recompense—forever isn’t exactly a lie, even if it’s not completely true.

Read

Read

Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Read

Read

Let Us Be Singing Fools: Norman Finkelstein’s The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems

If poetry is to remain a bulwark against the flagrant coarseness and cruelty at work in this moment of history, Norman Finkelstein’s work belongs right here with us.

Read

Read

Naming Our Phantoms: Tim Taranto’s Ars Botanica

There is no way to classify a response to pregnancy. It is what it is, which is why people find consolation in naming their phantoms. In this case, the phantom is named Catalpa.

Read

Read

A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno

The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life.

Read

Read

Gentrification Looks Like Us: Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris

Harris thoughtfully examines what happens when privilege and lack of privilege are forced to coexist in the same neighborhood—and, occasionally, in the same apartment.

Read

Read

Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life

I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.

Read

Read

Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart

Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear.

Read

Read

Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies

As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might.

Read

Read

Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone

I can’t help but wonder what if, in detangling love stories and our relationships to them, Catron is building yet another narrative—an anti-narrative, perhaps—of love.

Read