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.
First-time novelist Lisa Ko impressively employs a fractured narrative to portray the plight of fractured people, but don’t expect conventional satisfactions.
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.
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.
What makes Chen’s poetry so exhilarating is that these poems always have a center of gravity—the self—that keeps the many subjects they explore in orbit.
Touch is a compelling argument that we should embrace the physical world, genuine human connections, and reject the technology that comes between us and other people.
As we begin our own Age of the Strongman, Hussein’s almost effortless manipulation—of soldiers expecting exactly that behavior—shows how susceptible we all might be to the sheer force of a big personality.
In other words, sometimes we need to be jolted out of our predictable behaviors and routines. We need the kind of reading that scatters us, pulls and weaves our cerebral, emotional, and visceral chains.