February 27, 2017
February 2017 Micro-Reviews
Joshua Bennett. The Sobbing School. Penguin Random House, 2016. 96 pages. $18.00. As you wander The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett beware of ghosts; the layers of history sidle up […]
February 24, 2017
Have I Come Clean Enough?: Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams
San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2016. 136 pages. $20.00. It’s difficult to describe a Diane Williams story. Over twenty-five years, the author has crafted hundreds of fictional worlds that exist as […]
February 24, 2017
Recreating a Miraculous Object: Janaka Stucky’s The Truth Is We Are Perfect
Nashville, TN: Third Man Books, 2015. 76 pages. $15.95. In Janaka Stucky’s debut collection The Truth Is We Are Perfect, heartache is a metaphysical event that drops the poet into […]
February 17, 2017
“A Fever That Escalates With Every Blow”: Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida. Brooklyn, NY: Argos Books, 2015. 72 pages. $20.00. It’s a unique sort of despair to be Middle Eastern and living in a Western nation in 2017. […]
February 17, 2017
Being Christians in a World of Destitution and Injustice: On The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2016. 296 pages. $16.95. According to Transparency International, Ecuador is currently one of the most corrupt nations on Earth. It has a corruption score of […]
February 10, 2017
On The Unfinished World and Other Stories by Amber Sparks
New York: Liveright/W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. 240 pages. $15.95. It is fitting that a cabinet of curiosities is a central feature of the titular story of Amber Sparks’s […]
February 10, 2017
To Be Young, Christian, and Queer in the Fundamentalist South (With Apologies to Nina Simone)
Boy Erased. By Garrard Conley. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2016. 338 pages. $27.00. In 2014, Garrard Conley gave a TEDx talk about his experiences in the now infamous fundamentalist […]
February 3, 2017
On Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s Inherited Disorders
New York, NY: Regan Arts, 2016. 272 pages. $23.00. For all intents and purposes and according to its back cover, Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut book Inherited Disorders is a work […]
February 3, 2017
On Matthew Minicucci’s Translation
Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2015. 61 pages. $15.00. The word that comes to my mind as I re-read Matthew Minicucci’s debut collection is temper, as both noun and […]
January 27, 2017
“Apparent as Possible”: On Paisley Rekdal’s Imaginary Vessels
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016. 110 pages. $17.00. “I’m the architecture / for an elegy you can only guess at.” Late in “Shooting the Skulls,” a sequence of […]
January 27, 2017
Rendering the Poem Combustible: Arthur Vogelsang’s Orbit
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. 77 pages. $15.95. From his first collection A Planet (1983), Arthur Vogelsang has explored the earth’s history, our various human capacities, and the […]
January 20, 2017
The Best of Life is Now: On Willard Spiegelman’s Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 190 pages. $24.00. Willard Spiegelman’s collection of essays Senior Moments is quick with good sense, playfulness, and probing intelligence. His prose is […]