Reviews
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A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno
The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life.
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Gentrification Looks Like Us: Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris
Harris thoughtfully examines what happens when privilege and lack of privilege are forced to coexist in the same neighborhood—and, occasionally, in the same apartment.
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Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.
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Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear.
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Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies
As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might.
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Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone
I can’t help but wonder what if, in detangling love stories and our relationships to them, Catron is building yet another narrative—an anti-narrative, perhaps—of love.
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Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break.
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Not Your Typical Hero: Hostage by Guy Delisle
Against the muscular inevitability of Hollywood heroism, Hostage introduces the possibility that, in the face of the incomprehensible, we might remain ourselves.
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A Reluctant Chronicling: Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
“I typically hate discussing the past,” the speaker admits in the title poem, “Hard Child,” then a few poems later, a little more defensively—“I swear to God I hardly think of the past.”
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Bodies Testing Boundaries: The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld is a profound debut that carefully undermines the foundational assumptions we have about other people.
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More Than Vicarious: Conflation and ALOHA / irish trees
In this intimate, auditory format, you can hear the poets’ pages crinkling as they turn them—such a reassuring sound—turning pages instead of scrolling screens!
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Both Beauty and Horror: Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Tuffaha harnesses the legerdemain of lyric to link love and grief, anger and hope.