“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
“… this is the first time I’ve descended into Adelaide at night rather than day. I’m stunned by its squareness, by the rigid lines of its hyper-planned grid system.”
“A complex mixture of ‘bluntness and grace, directness and song’ to which W. S. Merwin attributes the unique tension and power of Thomas Wyatt’s verse attracts me devotedly to the work of Jessica Fisher and Carl Phillips.”
“Peek outside the door to the backyard, / there’s a quad of dead shrubs, cat skeletons, / and nopal cacti a father trims for nopales. / Dead children become sediment, a red moon / hovers over a river.”
“I spend a lot of money to look this cheap, Dolly Parton twanged / in her white suede mini-skirt and fringed jacket, her lips / a gobsmacking vermillion, her wig teased like a halo in San Marco.”
“When his assistants carry out a sentence, I often have to collect pieces of skull after moving the bodies, which takes extra time. When you have to cremate fifteen-twenty people in a night, you don’t want to be distracted by things like that.”
“My thoughts adhered to the blameless, blasted continent/ Untallied sites of immolations. Massacres / Some are beside freeways.”
“Humanity thrives, Powers means to say, when we can write a story that’s optimistic … And if we allow technology to help write the story — as if plugging the whole of society into ChatGPT — won’t we wind up in a better place, maybe?”
“a fluted / glass bottle stamped MILWAUKEE, / the glossed square of a magazine page, / which, unfolded, reveals Kathy Ireland / in a green bikini. With both hands the boy / closes — he nearly trembles — the rust-bitten / lid …”
“I’ve got nothing better to do / than wait for the recycle truck / so I can reclaim my barrel –– blue, / taller than a first grader, full.”
“When violence occurs and people are killed, injured and distressed, what do we want or expect to see? What does the ‘high tolerance for black death’ say about our media?”
“Grief may give Etter her alphabet — grief in particular over her mother’s death — but with formal virtuosity that seems almost effortless and improvisatory, Etter makes out of that alphabet a book of deeply moving poems.”
“About an hour later, a woman strolled in wearing a mink coat, her hair wavy from sleeping in rollers. An old man in a beret clung to the crook of her arm. For whatever reason, I glanced at the barman, and he gave a calm nod.”
“Let’s rename all our bones, he says, let’s fuse our skeletons together. Let’s become one whole new creature. And so, the old name was wrist. The new name is narrow. The old name was hip. The new name is sparrow.”
“Samarqandi asserted in a radio interview that ‘Tajik women need to learn to express their opinion freely, to be able to say what they like and what they don’t like, starting from a very young age. They need to know their rights, that they are free to choose who to be friends with, who to start a family with.'”
“I’ve never wanted my own body, never valued it. / To cut is proper, to forget, divine. // Mittens stippled with snow. Runners of a sled. / Tracks of a child’s destiny.”
“Allen’s collection seeks to calibrate an audience attuned to irony and misinformation, a correction that’s necessary before she can say anything in earnest. In doing so, she also resists the eurocentric demand to explain Oneida culture …”
“On the morning of his first day of school, Henry pours the water out of his thermos when his father isn’t looking and slips a toad inside. He leaves the lid loose so it can breathe and finds a cricket in the yard so it has lunch.”
“In abandoning some of the market’s rules of fiction – Savaş invites us to experience the renewable rules of expression — the old ways of being new — that are in play when an artist is performing at the sublime height of her art.”
“In the leaflet, I read of Kusama’s love of nature. Think of Aristotle declaring art as imitation / of nature, think of artifice. // In the native plant section, my friend Dominic introduces me to the flora and foliage by name. / I follow his eye like a monarch butterfly skimming the goldenrod.”
“I almost missed the sign which, along with chain / link fencing, was all that set the place apart from the miles / we’d already driven. So much spectacular // sameness begins to numb a person.”
“Ogawa beautifully captures the intricate emotions of a child who desperately wants to belong. And how relatively short intervals of our childhood can take on an outsized significance.z’
“All were denounced / as party pariahs & traitors / & the White House attorney // said in public that one / ‘should be shot.'”
“The poet’s latest collection is rich with allusions to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and other man-made dangers. Such themes pair well with Armantrout’s iconic version of Language poetry and her interest in quantum physics.”
“Nine years ago Leto was still a toddler—how old was she then, two? three?—yes, she’d just turned three when the fires broke out and the whole city burned for three days and nights, for three days and nights stores and houses were looted, the smoke seemed to trap and incite unspoken fears …”
“Let’s say two million Greeks were never expelled / from Asia Minor. That her protagonist, Axiotis Manolis, // could stay in Turkey and quietly farm / what he was certain would be his small plot // of everlasting life …”
“From the bustling streets of Cairo to the quiet solitude of Montreal, this novel is a sweeping saga of family secrets, cultural clashes, and the sacrifices made in the name of love.”
“But the world is hard, weighted / by concrete, sharp with bayonets / and belfries, in each bite, shards.”
“The couple’s relationship was mostly an epistolatory one – except for a brief vacation together in the spa town of Marienbad – and is buoyed by the 600 letters and postcards that Kafka wrote to Felice.”
“The request for more money came through email early one morning, before Jeff was out of bed. Mark had just made a pot of coffee when his phone pinged. Chelsea’s mother is requesting an extra $1,200 for supplies to support her pregnancy …”
“We approached some fragile union, / but it could not be sustained. You threatened secrets / I already knew. You missed the house wren’s song / because you kept talking.”
“An homage to fragmented forms of ancients solidified in ice and lost to the living world, a requiem. At the same time, the poetry retains the elegiac dimensions of his personal losses.”
“Women hunch over bags / of candy, soap, gallons of soda / and kids — / all they’ll carry inside. // Wet sneakers slide / through slush, / devoted, slow.”
“The first time I ate rhubarb Mom and I went out to the patch / beside the old hog shed to pick it, twisting and pulling it up / from the root, we sat on the stoop while she cut the stalks away / from the fronds …”