Features & Reviews
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“I Wanted the Magic Bullet”: A Conversation with Jessica Hoppe
…that’s what’s toxic: the belief that I’m not enough. Substances are, in general, neutral.
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The First Book: Melissa Petro
In our culture, motherhood is presumably sanctified, and I thought I’d experience social acceptance beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Instead, I felt under constant surveillance and yet utterly invisible….
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“I thought my sorrow could transform me”: A Conversation with Megan Pinto
Visually, prose tells us that we’re moving through time, through narrative or rhetoric, and visually, poetry tells us we’re moving up and down through lyric, feeling.
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“I Am in Love With Moons”: My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF) by Renee Gladman
But this is love: crying into your lover’s face until it becomes so ridiculous, that the event becomes absolutely precious.
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We Live in History: A Conversation with Nicolás Medina Mora
Who among us can say that the life they’re leading is the product of their choices and not a staging of the script they were handed at birth?
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Red as in: Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers
Perhaps like a phoenix, Martin maintains such a commanding presence throughout the book because she has endured the sacrificial fire of being a poet, the necessary self-immolation.
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The Persistence of Enchantment: A Conversation with Sofia Samatar
To me, the difference between invisibility and opacity is the difference between being misread and being granted a quality of privacy that is a fundamental part of being a human among other humans.
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A Meditation on Magical Girls: Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires
Park is not being cheeky. Rather, she’s taking a power that has lived in the hearts and minds of so many young people and propelling the magical girl genre into an entirely new dimension.
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The First Book: Yasmin Zaher
If I thought too much about audience, or audiences, I think I would encounter too many opposing demands and the writing would end up average.
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The Astonishing Power of African Poetry: A Review of New-Generation African Poets (Kumi)
Featuring gifted emerging poets from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa . . . Kumi is a final tribute to a visionary and valuable investment in African poetry.
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Narco-poetics and the Voice of Recovery: A Conversation with Azad Ashim Sharma
Hope stems in the imagination, in our capacity to re-imagine how life on this finite planet could coexist with non-human life and the cycles of shift that give us a cool summer breeze and the hurricane.
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The Possibilities Are Endless: Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights
[Valencia] portrays both the beauty and the horror of the desert, its landscape, and its inhabitants with the keen eye of someone who is intimately familiar with the rhythms and realities of desert life.