September 27, 2019
Inventing Silence: A Review of Ilya Kaminsky’s Second Collection
Deaf Republic. Ilya Kaminsky. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. 76 pages. $16.00. It’s been fifteen years since Ilya Kaminsky’s first poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, was published to critical acclaim. […]
September 20, 2019
Strained Lineage: Hervé Le Tellier’s All Happy Families
Trans. Adriana Hunter. New York, NY: Other Press, 2019. $15.99. Some family memoirs take up the work of unraveling bad attachments. They proceed by showing how bad fathers and mothers […]
September 20, 2019
On Cape May by Chip Cheek
New York, NY: Celadon Books, 2019. 256 pages. $26.99. Given how integral it is to the publishing industry’s bottomline, the Beach Read assumes a precise blueprint to minimize risk and […]
September 16, 2019
September 2019
Micro-Reviews
It’s National Translation Month, which means another round of micro-reviews of poetry in translation. A new inclusion here are two reviews of essay collections, one about poetry in translation and […]
September 16, 2019
September 2019 Micro-Reviews
It’s National Translation Month, which means another round of micro-reviews of poetry in translation. A new inclusion here are two reviews of essay collections, one about poetry in translation and […]
September 13, 2019
On Bright Stain by Francesca Bell
Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2019. 103 pages. $16.95. It’s tempting to call the poems in Francesca Bell’s arresting debut collection Bright Stain risky, but “risk” is one of those […]
September 6, 2019
On Brute by Emily Skaja
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. 74 pages.$16.00. Emily Skaja’s powerful debut collection, Brute, 2018 winner of the Walt Whitman Award, reads like a memoir full of intensity and insight. In […]
September 6, 2019
On The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector
Translated by Johnny Lorenz. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. 208 pages. $23.95. Virgínia, the protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s second novel, The Chandelier, has come to live in the city after […]
August 30, 2019
If You’re in Need, You’re a Foreigner Everywhere
Christos Ikonomou. Good Will Come From the Sea. Translated by Karen Emmerich. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2019. 255 pages. $18.00. “Becoming poor isn’t what breaks you. What breaks you is […]
August 23, 2019
On In the Time of PrEP by Jacques J. Rancourt
Windham, ME: Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018. 36 pages. $12.00. In 2012, the FDA approved the use of PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, a daily pill that reduces the chance of HIV […]
August 23, 2019
Spinning Ambivalencies: On Music for a Wedding by Lauren Clark
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. 88 pages. $15.95. Among the many penchants that classicists and poets share, perhaps most endearing is the desire to dig up roots and […]
August 16, 2019
Between You and Information is the Undone Room: Nomi Stone’s Kill Class
North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2019. 81 Pages. $17.95. Reading Nomi Stone’s second poetry collection, Kill Class, is like watching a play: each character in this recounted war game “lanterns […]