Reviews
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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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Science Fiction Can Change the World: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
With Borne VanderMeer presents a parable about modern life, in these shaky days of roughshod industrialism, civilizational collapse, and looming planetary catastrophe.
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The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
In Full Velvet offers the truth of a woman’s life—the queer truth, the queer rose, the queer valentine. And everything is different after that moment of initiation, instantiation.
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The Otherworldly Intrigue of Daisy Johnson’s Fen
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist.
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.
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Inequality Is Everyone’s Problem: The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne
Inequality, in Payne’s eyes, is massively detrimental to everyone in unequal societies, and everyone needs to know it.
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The Whimsy and Discipline of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day
If people cannot be captured, if “there are only erasures,” then might as well seek them in elisions, where their potential remains.
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A Full-Throated Cry from a Clarion: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
We seem to be floating in a weird soup of truthiness and alternative facts. Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American…
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Marie Howe Is Magic: Reading Magdalene
Howe’s Magdalene is ambitious in its reach and strangely timely, as American society has swung to the right and, in the process, against the tide of equality for women.
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Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.