November 3, 2017
On Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
New York, NY: FSG Originals, 2017. 240 pages. $15.00. Durga Chew-Bose’s lengthy, striking essay “Heart Museum,” the first piece in her debut essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood, […]
November 3, 2017
On Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
Translated by Jenny McPhee. New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2017. 221 pages. $14.95. Anyone who loves tiny Italian linguistic curiosities knows the 1963 memoir Family Lexicon by […]
October 27, 2017
“In the Mother Tongue”: On Fair Sun by Susan Barba
Boston, MA: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2017. 88 pages. $17.95. There’s an Armenian saying that goes, You are as many people as the languages you know. It’s not an especially […]
October 27, 2017
Removing the Veil of Celebrity in Amelia Gray’s Isadora
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 386 pages. $27.00. Long before the term “It Girl” was coined in the early twentieth century, there’s been a cultural fascination with […]
October 23, 2017
October Micro-Reviews
Shauna Osborn. Arachnid Verve. Mongrel Empire Press, 2016. 91 pages. $16.00. The poems in Arachnid Verve seem accessible and straightforward. Their language seems plain-spoken, direct, uncomplicated. The poems are straightforward, […]
October 23, 2017
October 2017 Micro-Reviews
Shauna Osborn. Arachnid Verve. Mongrel Empire Press, 2016. 91 pages. $16.00. The poems in Arachnid Verve seem accessible and straightforward. Their language seems plain-spoken, direct, uncomplicated. The poems are straightforward, […]
October 20, 2017
“i’ve never been so alive”: on Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2017. 96 pages. $16.00. Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead begins with a fantasy and ends in a dream. In the book’s final lines, one woman, skin […]
October 20, 2017
On Rosalie Moffett’s June in Eden
Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. 64 pages. $14.95. In “What It Was,” one of the first poems in Rosalie Moffett’s collection June in Eden, a mother speaks […]
October 13, 2017
On Late in the Empire of Men by Christopher Kempf
New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2017. 80 pages. $15.95. Christopher Kempf’s impressive debut, Late in the Empire of Men, is, from the outset, a tour de force of anti-nostalgia: […]
October 13, 2017
So You Think You Can’t Dance: On Dancing Boys: High School Males in Dance by Zihao Li
Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 179 pages. $27.95. Early on in Dancing Boys, a memoir-meets-ethnographic case study about boys who do and do not dance, author Zihao Li […]
October 6, 2017
Playing You False: Daisy Johnson’s Fen
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. 208 pages. $16.00. In her diary, Virginia Woolf wrote of the “attractive but impossible task of describing the Fens.” She longed for “one expressive quotation” […]
October 6, 2017
On Posthumous Collections of Poetry by Bill Knott and Thomas Lux
To the Left of Time. Thomas Lux. Boston, MA: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. 75 pages. $16.95. I am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014. Bill Knott, ed. Thomas Lux. […]