Commentary |
on A Theory of Birds, poems by Zaina Alsous
“The story of exile is fundamentally an erotic story, about loss and longing — and therefore, the poetics of unattainability is seductive for outsiders but useless for the people living in it.”
Commentary |
on Essays: One by Lydia Davis
“Davis’ writing on writing possesses a candor and warmth that are rare in the genre, even while she demands an unusual amount of rigor.”
Fiction |
“Siesta in the Cedar Tree”
“When Cecilia left at five that afternoon, walking alone through the woods, Elena ran to her mother’s room and said, ‘Cecilia has tuberculosis.’ Suddenly a fence sprang up around her …”
Commentary |
“Such Little Things We Are”: on Swift: New & Selected Poems by David Baker
“Swift reintroduces Baker’s older poems into our current environmental and political landscape while revealing how the lyric speaker can engage the natural world during moments of acute personal grief …”
Commentary |
“Who’d Want To Be A Man?”: on Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets & Father’s Day by Matthew Zapruder
“Zapruder is ruthless in his willingness to face down hard wrongs … and Skeets calls back into the fold of the present all who have been turned by its injustices and bigotry to ash.”
Commentary |
on The Boy in the Labyrinth, poems by Oliver de la Paz
“Lonely and crowded, loving and remote, The Boy in the Labyrinth is a paradoxical book—a collection of poems heavy and complicated with metaphor trying to understand two sons on the autism spectrum.”
Commentary |
on The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer
“Boyer refuses typical pink-ribbon euphemisms and instead offers a truer slogan: fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenisphere.
Commentary |
on Deaf Republic, poems by Ilya Kaminsky
“The light that shines from the language in Deaf Republic illuminates the terrible truths about what Philip Larkin called ‘the misery that man hands on to man.'”
Commentary |
on Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith’s Sweeping Poems of Dystopia
“This is the brilliance of Giménez Smith — the scope and range of the poet’s mind and the writer’s ability to traverse such grand and sprawling territory with the reader in tow.”
Commentary |
on Lima :: Limón, poems by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
“With an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region.”
Commentary |
on Three Women, nonfiction by Lisa Taddeo
“Part of what makes Three Women so entrancing are the unruly implications of these women’s disparate stories.”
Commentary |
on The Complaints, poems by W. S. Di Piero
“His poems are marked by a gentle, almost-childlike need to be reassured that, amidst the flux and confusion of being in time, someone — some absent ‘you’ — is listening.”
Commentary |
on White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row
“White Flights might best be described as a lament: Here we have a country with a rich ethnic and racial background, and our most acclaimed white writers seem to be strenuously laboring to avoid it.”