Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
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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.
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.
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.
A Live Ember: Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made
Over time, Strickland’s lines themselves grow wild, less uniform in their patterns of indentation. Like root structures deep in the ground, they branch in many directions.
Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
Rooted to the Earth: The Carrying by Ada Limón
Limón’s ability to express her speaker’s connection to the earth, her desire to bring forth life in all its forms, is breathtaking.
War Games: Kill Class by Nomi Stone
What happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer, and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
Peripheral Terror: Total Recall by Samantha Giles
There is horror in how a memory can be altered or rendered “false” by exterior forces.
Unsung Choices: Blue Rose by Carol Muske-Dukes
Can women ever fully escape the restrictions upon them, the risk to their bodies that comes from being born female?