Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
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Eliminated to Illuminated: Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages
Faizullah drills language for meaning.
Rooted to the Earth: The Carrying by Ada Limón
Limón’s ability to express her speaker’s connection to the earth, her desire to bring forth life in all its forms, is breathtaking.
War Games: Kill Class by Nomi Stone
What happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
Melodic, Honorable Engagement: Ryan Vine, T. R. Hummer, and Norman Finkelstein
Reading Vine, Hummer, and Finkelstein, in an era in which people often feel almost flattened, we rise.
Peripheral Terror: Total Recall by Samantha Giles
There is horror in how a memory can be altered or rendered “false” by exterior forces.
Unsung Choices: Blue Rose by Carol Muske-Dukes
Can women ever fully escape the restrictions upon them, the risk to their bodies that comes from being born female?
Raising the Dead: Claudia Castro Luna’s Killing Marías
The poems in Killing Marías sustain a deep reverence for women and are a call to action for the world.
A Subjective Magic: Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between
Boully splays open her own torso and readers divine what they need to from the spill of her organs.
Reclamation, Reassembly, and Recognition: Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e
What happens when the source of grief comes from within?
An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.