A Thin-Bladed Grace: Kristin Chang’s Past Lives, Future Bodies
Each luminous metaphor lays claim over sadness or violence, remaking it.
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New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
Terrible Beauty: Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
...in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.
Form as Container: Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets
Zighelboim almost has to break the form into pieces in order to speak; a fourteen-word poem is really only the echo of a sonnet.
Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
Hidden Just Beyond View: Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason
George interrupts us, clears her throat, makes us listen.
Between Bodies: The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
Yet the backyard cannot exist without the intimacy of the bedroom.
Two Extraordinary Books: Bullets into Bells and Inquisition
The obscenities and tragedies of American life pile up with speed, and in quantities, that are appalling.
Hero and Villain: Emily Pérez’s House of Sugar, House of Stone
How hard it is to trust the difference between sacrifice and sabotage!
A Kind of Communal History: Nepantla edited by Christopher Soto
Fundamentally, [Nepantla] is an act of history-making in verse.