review
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Our Recognizable, Difficult, Earthly Kingdom: Such Color by Tracy K. Smith
Composition here becomes a process of discernment rather than pure creation.
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Long Live the Book: Jessica Pressman’s Bookishness
It opens a field of inquiry that stretches to the far corners of culture.
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Woven Fibers and Broken Threads: Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s of colour
To be imbricated in hundreds of years of colonial violence is to be entangled in colorist logics and stories of loss and belonging that are rarely linear or singular.
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Power, Speech, and Silence: The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven
The Weak Spot is more interested in the invisible forces that guide our ways of being in the world.
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Startling Juxtapositions: Pilot Impostor by James Hannaham
Hannaham reserves his most vivifying language for planes and crashes.
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Laughing Through It: Emily Austin’s Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Morbid humor exists for a reason: to poke fun at our inevitable ends and lighten its emotional load.
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Holding Together What’s Left: The Blues of Heaven by Barbara Ras
You want to, but do you? Do you dare hope?
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How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Writing from the Bottom: Active Reception by Noah Ross
Active Reception writes into the place where language fails.
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An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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Bringing to Light: A Gathering and Tethering of Memory in Darla Himeles’s Cleave
Poems echo, rebound, and speak to one another.
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The Trauma of Surviving: Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho
Amid all this survival, Cho carries the reader through with the comfort of food.