Reviews
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It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
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Sketch Book Reviews: The Book of (More) Delights
Today’s delight: a flush of blooming forget-me-nots creating a blue blanket on the edge of my garden.
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A Horror That Cannot be Helped
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.
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Embodiment as a Sensorial Practice in Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature
Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies . . . lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone.
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Holding a Mirror to Realism in The Novices of Lerna
His fictional world, as presented in this novella, develops a split truth, one where narrative reality and absurdist abstraction hang in the balance.
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Is this the Danish Girl, Interrupted? Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom
“Have you ever confused a dream with life?”
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A Panoptical View of Slough: On Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering
Scattered with a sparse collection of the poet’s original sketches . . . the poems move through the slanted and repetitive months of the pandemic, bleeding into “self-digesting” seasons.
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A Dance of One’s Own: Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera
The return of someone deceased is a common enough trope, but where it is normally horrific . . . Polek initially runs jolly with it.
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So Foreign Yet So Familiar: Three Early Novels by Amit Chaudhuri
But Chaudhuri pays keen attention to these seemingly self-evident truths, articulating what we think we know but keep forgetting.
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A Comedy of Venture Capitalism: Ryan Chapman’s The Audacity
PrevYou is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley . . . The only problem? The claims are phony.
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Between Conceptualism and Hyperpop in Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle
Here, failure to be “personal” reveals the unconscious biases that structures readers’ expectations of what counts as “personal.”
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Seeing What You Can’t Hear: Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test
. . . ruminations on the creative process and what it means when your sense of self is upended through a series of small violences capture the mundanity in trudging through a long-term illness.