An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
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Posts Tagged: book review
Unglued from Time: Shahriar Mandanipour’s Moon Brow
An enjoyable and thought-provoking read, Moon Brow trades on its striking and unusual formal features to allude to the complexities and consequences of war.
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A Thin-Bladed Grace: Kristin Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies
Each luminous metaphor lays claim over sadness or violence, remaking it.
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A Sense of God: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
Perhaps one of the most beautiful things Moore does is to give voice to those who would not or did not have a voice.
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Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
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Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
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Terrible Beauty: Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
…in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.
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Three Strong Women: Lisa Rosenberg, Maw Shein Win, and Libby Burton
Welcome all three of these books with enthusiasm for what they do, and with shared possibilities for the ”craved world.”
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Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
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Beautiful Evil: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Alaska attracts those looking to be free from the constraints of society.
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Struggling toward Truth: Porochista Khakpour’s Sick
Khakpour gathers courage, again and again, as she reaches into the most painful parts of her life, excavates them, and holds them up to the light.
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Learning to Grow Where Planted: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones
Part of looking closer is seeing what is hard to face, and part of having courage is addressing what seems futile.
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To Choose Music: Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble
The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit.
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A Myth of Her Own Making: The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again.
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Faith and Identity: Fireworks in the Graveyard by Joy Ladin
To “ameliorate” the desire for death or the sense of self-annihilation, Ladin finds in religion a way of reconciliation, not only within herself, but also with her community and society at large.
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Going Higher: Unearthings by Wendy Chen
Chen’s sense of history is reason enough to appreciate her poetry, but equally thrilling is her language.
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Trust Us When We’re Sick: Maya Dusenbery’s Doing Harm
The systems created for men by men are not sufficient in caring for women. Different bodies and chemical makeups, of course, require different treatments.
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Uncovering Buried Roots: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
There are two ways to read Freshwater: there is the knowing and the unknowing.
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Wide-Eyed and Awed: Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had so I drew it
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites.
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A Source of Life: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
There’s a lot left unsaid between the women of Red Clocks; not even they know the extent to which they’re all connected.
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Gentrification Looks Like Us: Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris
Harris thoughtfully examines what happens when privilege and lack of privilege are forced to coexist in the same neighborhood—and, occasionally, in the same apartment.
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Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear.
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Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone
I can’t help but wonder what if, in detangling love stories and our relationships to them, Catron is building yet another narrative—an anti-narrative, perhaps—of love.
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Not Your Typical Hero: Hostage by Guy Delisle
Against the muscular inevitability of Hollywood heroism, Hostage introduces the possibility that, in the face of the incomprehensible, we might remain ourselves.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
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Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
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The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
[Moving Kings] has brilliant things to say about America and Israel, war and peace, diaspora and home.
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Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford
Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become.
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Gogol Meets Google: Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
[A]ttempts to relegate human impulses to some eminently manageable virtual domain end up revealing more about humanity than tech.
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You’re My Home Now: Lisa Ko’s The Leavers
First-time novelist Lisa Ko impressively employs a fractured narrative to portray the plight of fractured people, but don’t expect conventional satisfactions.
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