Reviews
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A Seaside Carnival of Narration: On Andrzej Tichý’s Purity
“You’ll be my way out. . . . And it makes no difference what you’re thinking or feeling, or whether or not you believe in transcendence or whatever you call it. I’m already inside of you.”
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“There Is No Page That Can Hold Me”: Sam Sax’s Yr Dead
By insisting that Ezra’s ordinary life is epic, Sax shows that every life must be epic, holding everyone accountable. No one can sit out.
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The Pawns of History Arise: Tania James’s Loot
What happens to the artist when his society shatters? How does he keep alive the impetus to create after losing his family and place in the world?
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Finding A New “Happily Ever After”: Susan Ostrov’s Loveland
But for so many of us, love is “a puzzle with jig-sawed edges, and all we have are scattered, often missing, pieces of ourselves.
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The Archive as Potter’s Field: Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman
As the handwritten stories unfold, the lives of the two ceramicists come closer and closer.
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The Great Man and The Wife: On Controlling the Narrative in Sarah Manguso’s Liars
Marriage and motherhood become like invasive species that coil around Jane’s career, leeching her of energy and creative drive.
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PT Porn and Transfiction: Ann Rower’s If You’re A Girl
Ann Rower was 53 when she made her literary debut with this collection of personal essays and stories. Initially published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as the first entry of their Native Agents series that platformed women in an overly male…
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Letting Go of What We Should Have Had: Adam Phillips’s On Giving Up
We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
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Unearthing the Past in The Safekeep
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
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A Tight-Lipped Kind of Love: Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight…Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
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Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
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Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.