Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Survival, for Landau, is both instinctual and ultimately pointless.
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Posts Tagged: book review
The Violence of Forgetting: The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball
His is not a language that trivializes violence; it’s a language that exposes it.
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Turning and Turning: Jericho Brown’s The Tradition
[T]his is a book in direct conversation with literary tradition.
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A Beautiful Silver Screen: Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays of a Star
[W]hat lies beneath the arcing paths of these stars, fueling and frustrating them?
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Fragmenting Forward: Brute by Emily Skaja
After all, isn’t this often the truth of loss? What once was home becomes a graveyard.
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Expunging the Bogeyman: Sady Doyle’s Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
The root of these imagined, monstrous versions of women, Doyle argues, is fear.
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The Brink of Unbearable: Careen by Grace Shuyi Liew
[I]t is as if I am learning a new language with each poem.
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Everyday Ferocity: Kathleen Hale’s Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker
Throughout the collection, Hale speaks with an assured, accessible voice.
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Grounded by Circumstance: Tina Barr’s Green Target
Barr is an astonishing image-maker, adept in creating significance through anthimeria.
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Both Aggressor and Victim: Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Who is Adèle Robinson, really, and what is it, exactly, that happened to her?
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More Than Ordinary: If the House by Molly Spencer
Attention—where it is, where it is not—pervades If the House.
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The Precipice of Possibility: Leslie Jamison’s Make It Scream, Make It Burn
This thrill that comes with being on the precipice of possibility runs rampant throughout Make It Scream, Make It Burn.
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A Hybrid Wonder: Niloufar Talebi’s Self-Portrait in Bloom
Your book is full of glorious limbos.
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Uncomfortable Truths: The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
Making it to thirty seems unimaginable, yet it happens anyway.
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Remembering as Deconstruction: Eduardo Halfon’s Mourning
To scrutinize the past, one must approach the walls between then and now.
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A Window with Reality Through It: Everything Here by Billie Swift
Swift’s shuffled lines create haunting, breathtaking possibilities.
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Everyone You Love Is Broke: The Not Wives by Carley Moore
How do you go on when the losses seem unbearable?
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The (Pleasurable) Anxiety of (Aesthetic) Influence: Bill Berkson’s A Frank O’Hara Notebook
Long after O’Hara died, O’Hara was still influencing, shaping, editing, Berkson.
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Love under Capitalism: Sally Rooney’s Normal People
[I]n Normal People love acts as a school.
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A Parcel of Stories: Hard Damage by Aria Aber
The speaker in Hard Damage, it seems, is writing herself to life.
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Pay Attention: T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through
I’m hungry for truth and kids are just spouting facts up and down the street.
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Courageous Music: Jane Mead’s To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
Her poems make felt observations sing, no matter the subject.
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Nothing Ever Disappears: Pigs by Johanna Stoberock
Simplicity obfuscates itself by the very act of being observed.
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Angry Reminders: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Human beings like to make myths out of things we don’t understand.
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The Language of Grief: Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
To grieve is to demonstrate dedication to those we love.
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Beginning Again: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
For Little Dog, putting language to memory becomes a way to survive.
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Modern Lives We Lived: Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies
Social and economic forces are always pressing on the characters in Wang’s work.
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Transcending Metaphor: Jenifer Sang Eun Park’s Autobiography of Horse
To call [AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HORSE] unique is an understatement.
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Not Here to Make Friends: Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer
Consistent with the author’s headlong personality, the narrative of Rough Magic wastes little time.
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A Fierce Compassion: Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE recognizes this reality with fierce compassion, and a lot of really fine poetry.
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