book review
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A Gripping, Limited Call to Arms: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
There are so many happy endings that dystopia and utopia become almost indistinguishable by the novel’s end.
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Living the Unknown: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House
I needed this book. Maybe you will, too.
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Colonialism as Alien Invasion: Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson
What if the arrival of alien life wasn’t the future, but just another recapitulation of our bloody past?
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A Metaphysical Inquiry: Nick Laird’s Feel Free
The work maintains a wondering backward, as it were, tracing the varied details of lived experience.
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A Story of Memory: Machine by Susan Steinberg
The narrator is trapped here, in the summer her family and her life fell apart.
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Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Survival, for Landau, is both instinctual and ultimately pointless.
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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.