The Great Man and The Wife: On Controlling the Narrative in Sarah Manguso’s Liars
Marriage and motherhood become like invasive species that coil around Jane’s career, leeching her of energy and creative drive.
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PT Porn and Transfiction: Ann Rower’s If You’re A Girl
Ann Rower was 53 when she made her literary debut with this collection of personal essays and stories. Initially published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as the first entry of their Native Agents series that platformed women in an overly male literary landscape, If You’re a Girl captured the spit and vinegar of mid-late twentieth-century female bohemia.
Letting Go of What We Should Have Had: Adam Phillips’s On Giving Up
We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
Unearthing the Past in The Safekeep
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
A Tight-Lipped Kind of Love: Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight...Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
Sketch Book Reviews: The Book of (More) Delights
Today's delight: a flush of blooming forget-me-nots creating a blue blanket on the edge of my garden.
A Horror That Cannot be Helped
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.
Embodiment as a Sensorial Practice in Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature
Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies . . . lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone.