criticism

More Flowers interrogates how patriarchal authority persists even in its absence, transmitted through maternal caretaking rather than overt dominance. While an authoritative male figure is not present, the mother still governs by his rule, passing down restrictive and traditional expectations…

Jon-Perse’s vision for computer generated poetry can be summed up as a kind of obliteration of the author.

Like silence, violence is not quantifiable. Put the indefinite article “a” in front of it and the monolithic world of violence shutters into a reflective surface of infinite, biodiverse fragments. What counts as violence?

The incisive precision of The Seeds’s assemblage cannot be overstated: if the collection is an ecosystem, its sections and sequences are habitats, and each poem is a haunt. The poems are divided into five sections, bookended by a hackberry, and…

This refusal to treat trauma as singular or sacred, to set it apart from the texture of ordinary life, is among the collection’s quietly bracing achievements. Jacobson’s stories don’t deny suffering. But they do deny it the dignity of exception…

Queer joy is something this book gives appropriately vast space to.

It is this “shock,” this consistent disintegration, and the techniques necessary to stall it, that Maya Salameh so tenderly and precisely metabolizes on the page. Water is our earliest teacher, and Salameh shapes language like it. Salameh’s lyric feels familiar:…

Russia is a country full of criminals, yes—but also home to creative spirits who are drawn to the stage, page, or canvas to tell a story

..the way virginity becomes larger than itself, something that marks the women who bear it as a kind of prey.

This repetition evokes an incantation, signaling the recursive and often reverent nature of the speaker’s desire. For Farah’s speaker—and for many living in diaspora—longing is an ongoing ritual, an inheritance. Ending the poem with a comma, Farah leaves the reader…