criticism

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…

Contemporary readers can relate to Vitangelo, as social media seems designed to focus on what others think of us.

Before venturing into Cantrell’s poetic narrative, the 9×7-inch poetic design of the collection presents symmetrical squared concrete poems encouraging disarray to the reading experience. Where one’s reading experience may take place traditionally across the page from left to right, the…

I entered this book as one would enter an art gallery– clueless, curious, and slightly apprehensive. Very quickly though, the book held my hand and taught me how to read it. As in an art gallery, the book guides the…

Except that Andrew Scott plays all eight characters. A page in the playbill explains that the one-man-show idea occurred accidentally during readings of Stephens’ straight version. ‘It turns out when one person [does it], when there was one voice,’ Scott…

Toni Morrison’s Beloved arrives at its reader with the economy of a hush and the force of a storm. It is an argument written in the grammar of ghosts: sentences that are at once precise and porous, voices braided together…

Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising,…

“The problem: What if the tragedy has no end point? In Yiyun Li’s latest memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, the author spurns the term “grief” and its attachment to endings. For Li, the definition of grief is tied to…

Richard Siken’s virtuoso third collection, I Do Know Some Things, Copper Canyon Press 2025, arrives as a righteous heir of Edson’s vision. The book, bloated with human truth and stripped of pretense, offers black comedy, lyrical excavation, and a persistent,…

The poet is not a singularity and is overwhelmingly in the world, among others, even when they are in a room with the windows shut to keep out the noise. Ameneyro’s most profound moments emerge when he shifts from singular…