Reviews

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Navigating Empathy: Camille T. Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

• Cate Hodorowicz
• July 21, 2017

Luckily for us, Dungy’s increase in empathy and experience coincides with her embrace of the braided essay: her thinking crashes people, places, and ideas against each other in unexpected and adventurous ways.

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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles

• Bradley Babendir
• July 20, 2017

As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.

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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar

• Barbara Berman
• July 14, 2017

American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.

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Beauty Undercut by the Possibility of Terror: Afterland by Mai Der Vang

• Jenna Lê
• July 7, 2017

Precariousness is an essential condition of life for the people who populate Vang’s poems, especially the Hmong refugees on whom the poet’s eye most lovingly lingers.

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Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai

• Chris Vaughan
• July 6, 2017

Vastness does not always mean an abyss.

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The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen

• Ben Purkert
• July 4, 2017

[Moving Kings] has brilliant things to say about America and Israel, war and peace, diaspora and home.

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Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford

• Olivia Kate Cerrone
• June 30, 2017

Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become.

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Gogol Meets Google: Made for Love by Alissa Nutting

• Nina Renata Aron
• June 29, 2017

[A]ttempts to relegate human impulses to some eminently manageable virtual domain end up revealing more about humanity than tech.

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You’re My Home Now: Lisa Ko’s The Leavers

• Jason Roberts
• June 27, 2017

First-time novelist Lisa Ko impressively employs a fractured narrative to portray the plight of fractured people, but don’t expect conventional satisfactions.

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The Impossible Question: Vagrants & Accidentals by Kevin Craft

• Cate Hodorowicz
• June 23, 2017

How are we to live when loss—personal, environmental, and political—is heaped upon loss?

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Grief Is Not Regret: May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood

• Bromleigh McCleneghan
• June 22, 2017

When women do not want a pregnancy, we may not experience the marvel and awe some claim are instant and “natural”—or, if we do, they are overshadowed by fear, and grief.

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Say Everything: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

• Julia Bosson
• June 20, 2017

Truth is complicated, thorny, and often paradoxical. Marzano-Lesnevich advocates for a version of events that doesn’t attempt to simplify its subjects, that doesn’t reduce human life to weak metaphors.

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