Reviews Archives - Page 54 of 221

Poetry That Makes You Nearly Miss the Plane: The Complete Works of Pat Parker edited by Julie R. Enszer

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.

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When Theory and Fiction Collide: Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac

Theory and fiction have a history. They’d been flirting with each other for centuries and now regularly engage in textual intercourse.

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Controlled Burns: Meadowland Take My Hand by Pamela Hughes

It's old news that there’s poetry in decomposition, but welcome news that Jersey has such an astutely musical young voice.

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The “Reality” of Memoir: Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story

Memoirists are not transcriptionists of their pasts, recalling conversations verbatim. They are artists, whose job is to interpret the lived history through an artistic lens.

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An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World

Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak.

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The Many Faces of Arab Culture: Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Narratives like this one complicate and humanize America’s simplistic view of Arab cultures, toppling the flimsy idea that Arab people are intractably Other.

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Worlds Full of Demons: Chavisa Woods’s Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country

We must ask ourselves: who stands in the shadows of our national persona, both historically and in the nation’s literature? Woods raises the question, and her work points toward an answer.

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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks

In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.

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Haunted by Child Refugees: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends

These aren’t ghosts; these are children who have braved a perilous journey to escape the violent nightmares back home.

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Family Is the Deepest Scar: Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother

With each word, I found myself thinking of my own grandmother’s journey, escaping war to America with no money, no education, and six children, the pain of this experience inevitably hardening the whole family.

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All of the Facts and None of the Truth: Fox Frazier-Foley’s Like Ash in the Air after Something Has Burned

While these women are physically gone, they gain agency after their deaths through Frazier-Foley’s poems.

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Pressing Back against the Pressure: A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff

It’s about pressure. The pressure of one being enveloping another being, of one mother hugging her child, of a greater force subsuming and defining a lesser.

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