Reviews
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Portrait, Not Polemic: Laura & Emma by Kate Greathead
[S]quint at the story one way and you see a woman’s life hollowed out by the very privilege that allows her to coast; look at it from another angle and you see a regular person living a multi-faceted, flawed life.
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The Tension of Identity: Hands That Break and Scar by Sarah A. Chavez
For Sarah A. Chavez, the body works as a site of difference and violence, but also magic and wisdom.
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Tarnished, Shiny Exteriors: Kate Braverman’s A Good Day for Seppuku
With A Good Day for Seppuku, Braverman has written a collection of intense images and exacting language
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Uncovering Buried Roots: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
There are two ways to read Freshwater: there is the knowing and the unknowing.
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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.
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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.
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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.