The Art of Attention: Jill Christman’s If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
“If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself, squarely and deeply.”
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Posts Tagged: book review
Indiana Anomie: Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington
a portrait of the American tendency to keep the suffering of others at arm’s length as if misfortune were contagious, or to ruthlessly eliminate it entirely
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From the Archive: Propelled by Questions: Animal by Dorothea Lasky
The animal spirit of poetry brings us closer to our own humanity.
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From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
An illustrated review of Sumana Roy’s new essay collection, HOW I BECAME A TREE!
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A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
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From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: Girlhood by Melissa Febos
An illustrated review of Melissa Febos’s new essay collection, GIRLHOOD!
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Defying Gravity: Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars
This book is disarmingly—in fact, unnervingly—amoral.
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Still, Life: Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
I’ll never see Kitamura’s exhibition in real life, but I’m still grateful to have been invited to the opening.
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How to Watch While Being Watched: Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis
The experience, rather than linear, is borealian.
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Eugene Lim’s Search History
Lim has written before about experimental fiction and the need to slough off such conventions of narrative as plot.
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Metaphor by Any Means Necessary: Destiny O. Birdsong’s Negotiations
Metaphor can make life more bearable, meaningful, or simply comprehensible.
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A Sinister Kind of Beauty: Joanna Pearson’s Now You Know It All
The narrator then returns to normal life, only to discover that life may never be normal again.
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Under the Influence of Jane Wong: A Recipe-Qua-Review of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
Combine multiple ingredients in a single stanza-bowl.
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Bear Witness: What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J. A. Chancy
Remember us, the characters seem to beg of the reader, imagined mirrors of the real lives lost and mourned.
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Our Recognizable, Difficult, Earthly Kingdom: Such Color by Tracy K. Smith
Composition here becomes a process of discernment rather than pure creation.
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Long Live the Book: Jessica Pressman’s Bookishness
It opens a field of inquiry that stretches to the far corners of culture.
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Woven Fibers and Broken Threads: Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s of colour
To be imbricated in hundreds of years of colonial violence is to be entangled in colorist logics and stories of loss and belonging that are rarely linear or singular.
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Power, Speech, and Silence: The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven
The Weak Spot is more interested in the invisible forces that guide our ways of being in the world.
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Startling Juxtapositions: Pilot Impostor by James Hannaham
Hannaham reserves his most vivifying language for planes and crashes.
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Laughing Through It: Emily Austin’s Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Morbid humor exists for a reason: to poke fun at our inevitable ends and lighten its emotional load.
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Holding Together What’s Left: The Blues of Heaven by Barbara Ras
You want to, but do you? Do you dare hope?
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How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Bourdain by Laurie Woolever
An illustrated review of Laurie Woolever’s new book, BOURDAIN.
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Writing from the Bottom: Active Reception by Noah Ross
Active Reception writes into the place where language fails.
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An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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Bringing to Light: A Gathering and Tethering of Memory in Darla Himeles’s Cleave
Poems echo, rebound, and speak to one another.
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The Trauma of Surviving: Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho
Amid all this survival, Cho carries the reader through with the comfort of food.
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Bright Buoy, Dark Sea: Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides
Like a buoy, Agodon’s poems rise above and go below the surface.
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Wow, Mom!: Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker
The best books I have read about motherhood have not reassured me that these feelings will resolve.
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Projective Wonder: Imagine Us, the Swarm by Muriel Leung
The individual and the crowd might prove as false a binary as anything else, even that [perforated] line sketched between poetry and prose.
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