September 18, 2020
On In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays by Rebecca McClanahan
Note: I was introduced to Rebecca and came to appreciate her writing thanks to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. (I did not attend her workshop but Dinty’s and David’s, as […]
September 14, 2020
September 2020 Micro-Reviews, Part 1
Translation is always relevant, but as we move through this current moment, to highlight translational work feels even more necessary, more urgent. Case in point, when I put out the […]
September 11, 2020
Language and the Long Poem: On Everything and Other Poems by Charles North
Brooklyn, NY: The Song Cave, 2020. 90 pages. $17.95. When I first encountered Charles North’s fascinating poem “Everything: Coda” (Poetry, Dec. 2016), I was amused by the idea that after […]
September 4, 2020
Come On, People, Now: On Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour
New York, NY: Vintage Books / Random House, May 2020. 240 pages. $16.00. These days, it’s not hard to imagine substantial groups of Americans entertaining the idea of leaving the […]
August 28, 2020
On The Migrant States by Indran Amirthanayagam
Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2020. 96 pages. $18.00. The Migrant States enacts an immigrant’s experience of America in the twenty-first century. The cover is red, white, and blue: Texas […]
August 21, 2020
On Rainy Days on the Farm by Lesle Lewis
Hudson, NY: Fence Books, 2019. 97 pages. $16.00. Poetry, for some poets, is what they can bear saying when language feels insufficient; Lesle Lewis’s sixth collection, Rainy Days on the […]
August 14, 2020
“Full Up of Feeling” for The Lightness by Emily Temple
New York, NY: William Morrow, 2020. 288 pages. $26.99. Emily Temple’s debut novel washes over the reader like childhood, if your childhood was spent attending an all-girls spiritual camp in […]
August 7, 2020
On Inheritors by Asako Serizawa
New York, NY: Doubleday Books/Penguin Random House, 2020. 288 pages. $26.95. Asako Serizawa’s first book of fiction begins with a crumbling memory. Eighty-two-year-old Ayumi can no longer remember the names […]
July 31, 2020
Objective Feeling: A Review of Amanda Auerbach’s What Need Have We for Such as We
Click here to buy this book at the publisher’s website. Winston-Salem, NC: C&R Press, 2019. 80 pages. $16.00. Amanda Auerbach’s What Need Have We for Such as We does not […]
July 24, 2020
On Forage by Rose McLarney
New York, NY: Penguin Books/Penguin Random House, 2019. 80 pages. $20.00. The first poem you’ll come across in Rose McLarney’s Forage—if you’re the kind of reader who sets out from […]
July 17, 2020
Victoria Chang and the Elegy/Anti-Elegy: On Obit
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020. 119 pages. $17.00. When I was in high school, I was offered a job at my local newspaper to cover junior high sports. […]
July 10, 2020
“Make This Sol a Clear, High Note”: On Mars Travel and the Post-Apocalyptic Earth in Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’s The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons
Cincinnati, OH: Acre Books, 2020. 86 pages. $16.00. In The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’s second collection, we leave Earth, our once-home, a “flickering, lost blue […]