Documenting Existence: Deed by Justin Wymer
Wymer is grappling with survival, with the cost of the duplicity of identity.
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Posts Tagged: review
What Society Allows Us to Be: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning
What does it mean to be free?
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Still Wouldst Thou Sing: Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
Figures from antiquity—those masks of learned, privileged poets—are rendered utterly contemporary, down to earth.
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Identity Politics and the English Language: Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times
Who “owns” the English language?
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Wistful Intimacies: Homie by Danez Smith
Could I be one of Smith’s homies? I would like to be.
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Justice by Seeing: Of Color by Jaswinder Bolina
But perhaps it is our want for firm ground that Bolina is challenging.
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Learning to Be Haunted: Dennis James Sweeney’s Ghost/Home
We make a home, in other words, by letting in our ghosts.
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Any Moment Is a Door: Nadia Colburn’s The High Shelf
Again, the red door stands open, allowing the world to enter.
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Brief Moments Upon the Blank Page: Moyra Davey’s Index Cards
The collection enacts—even performs—its own coming into being.
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Beloved Names and Incantatory Powers: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s The Inheritance of Haunting
And so it is an exorcism, yes, but also a song.
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The Cost of Liberation: Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Patsy’s imagined freedom in America, she discovers almost immediately, was an illusion.
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Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell
This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.
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The World Is on Fire: Living Weapon by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
A democratic art, the poet says, will take us through. Come November, vote.
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The Privilege of Anxiety: Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse
What does our “future-dread,” as O’Connell puts it, show us about our own lives in the present?
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A Quintessential Quarantine Read: Paige Lewis’s Space Struck
Narratives, reflections—“bright particulars,” every one.
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Reclaiming History from the Bigots: Jill Lepore’s This America
History itself is not so conveniently tidy, and neither is this book.
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The Authentic Self: I Live in the Country & other dirty poems by Arielle Greenberg
Every poem in I Live in the Country sells what it’s craving.
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Girl Power: Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks
But this is We Ride Upon Sticks: someone’s perm falls out, someone becomes prom queen.
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Gospel That Kicks Up the Dust: Neck of the Woods by Amy Woolard
Tenderness lies between the sharp and the sweet.
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What Is (and Isn’t) Held in the Light: Diane Zinna’s The All-Night Sun
Trauma’s wing conceals and reveals.
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Homage as Provocation: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility
Pretend you are Austen. Enact an Austen novel. And what will happen?
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A Deeper Narrative: Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Heaven Is All Goodbyes
These are not poems to read quickly, but to return to repeatedly.
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The Complications of #MeToo: Mary Gaitskill’s This Is Pleasure
Quin, too, must make sense of his behavior and the consequences.
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What Could Be: All Its Charms by Keetje Kuipers
The decision to have a child is fraught at the best of times.
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What We Eventually Forget: Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
I surprised myself by reading Memory in an afternoon.
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A Poetic Smorgasbord: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Each sentence is calculated; each word explodes.
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A Fantastic Communion: Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay
Salt—the speaker’s only remains, after she dives into the ocean and sets herself free of the past.
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Trauma as Inheritance: Adam P. Frankel’s The Survivors
The survivor is left to ponder whom he has become.
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Observations of an Inquisitive Mind: Fruit by Bruce Snider
These are not poems of self-pity. Far from it.
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Quiet, Radical Defiance: The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty
Education, work, study: these were not simply a means to an end.
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