criticism

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…

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,…