July 23, 2021
On A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill
Eds. Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. 736 pages. $45.00. “I need to set my thoughts in order for the inevitable Poem,” wrote James […]
July 16, 2021
On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal
Translated by Jessica Moore. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 240 pages. $27.00. Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time is a novel about becoming an artist. At first the novel […]
July 9, 2021
Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2021. 112 pages. $17.00. The Naomi Letters, Rachel Mennies’s second collection of poems, is made up of letters to Naomi, a figure who stands in for […]
July 2, 2021
Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography
New York: Nightboat Books, 2021. 340 pages. $17.95. In Plastic: An Autobiography, Allison Cobb asks hard questions about how to live in the world as it really is, toxicity abounding, […]
June 25, 2021
From Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon
Eds. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 327 pages. $24.95. Lethologica is an inability to remember the right word. A compelling term, but […]
June 18, 2021
On The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy
New York, NY: Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2021. 304 pages. $27.00. The internet has swallowed the novel! So suggests the cover of The Atmospherians, Alex McElroy’s debut, which is designed […]
June 11, 2021
On The Renunciations by Donika Kelly
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2021. 104 pages. $16.00. Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations is not content with the singular equivalencies of metaphor. Kelly’s second collection balances transformation and definition, constructing a […]
June 4, 2021
Reverberations and Divinations in Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra
Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2020. 59 pages. $17.95. I went looking for the lyric. For a long time, I’ve been attempting to return to a creative period in 2013 […]
May 28, 2021
On Stardust Media by Christina Pugh
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. 96 pages. $16.95. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, the Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr declares of […]
May 21, 2021
On Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown
New York, NY: Persea Books, 2020. 115 pages. $24.95. As the title of Molly McCully Brown’s debut collection of essays reveals, Places I’ve Taken My Body is a book about […]
May 14, 2021
The World Owes You Nothing: A Review of Mine! by Michael Heller and James Salzman
New York, NY: Penguin Random House/Doubleday, 2021. 336 pages. $27.95. We claim so many things that aren’t ours: the lane in traffic for the speed we’re driving, the electricity soon […]
May 6, 2021
On Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young
Translated by Hedgie Choi. Black Ocean, 2021. $16.00. “In Kafka’s The Trial there’s actually a sentence that goes ‘__________*’,” we learn in Moon Bo Young’s collection of poetry Pillar of […]