book review
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Our Own Glimmering Darkness: Insomnia by Marina Benjamin
Sleep seems like a stretch of velvet to which Benjamin is unable to submit.
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The Gates of American Belonging: Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues
It begins with a gunshot.
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Any War, Every War: Checkpoint by David Albahari
Individual soldiers become a formless mass. War becomes an end in itself.
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Making Absence Present: Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira
Saudade is often translated as longing, and as with most translations, what gets left out matters.
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Solidarity in Sickness: Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
There is something so incredibly comforting about the honesty in Huber’s voice.
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A Kind of Balm: Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz
Except she isn’t windless and neither are we, thanks to her.
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Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
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Show without Telling: Stay by Tanya Olson
[I]f you want maximum pleasure from this collection, then, you will want to listen closely.
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A Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
Undergirding all the truth about pain is the triumph that comes from having a heart like a window and a mouth like a cliff.
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A Strange Liminal Space: George Abraham’s The Specimen’s Apology
Each formal experiment is a temporary hole into a new world that opens, then collapses, behind the reader.
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A Gentle Reckoning: Blas Falconer’s Forgive the Body This Failure
If there is distance in this collection, it originates with our own discomfort with its subject matter.
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A Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
The child is born of them, yet is other to them; they work on behalf, and yet despite, and also against her.