review

Angel Dominguez, a Latinx poet of Yucatec Maya descent, creates a revolutionary reading experience with their work “Desgraciado.” Written as a series of letters to Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Maya language in 1562, this collection feels like the ashes of burnt history slipping through generations of fingers, […]

Before we even reach the first word of the central narrative, it’s clear that Search History isn’t your typical novel. The first page almost looks like an antique print, and claims the book by an elongated title of no fewer than thirty-six words. The pages continue with a frontispiece of Miyoko Ito’s Oracle, a “true” […]

Marcela Sulak’s latest poetry collection, City of Skypapers, builds the walls of a beloved city and then explores inside and outside of them, navigating the personal and public spaces of wartime. She paints pictures of a sea of palms, shadows of dust, the scents and bustle of a flourishing garden, and then she rattles this […]

Gillian Osborne’s collection of poetic essays and letters, Green Green Green, sat in my to-read pile through the end of summer, and for some reason, I turned to its vibes of spring as the weather grew colder in the fall. Osborne expresses some agreement with Thoreau’s statement that “books of natural history make the most […]

T.J. Sandella beseeches us all to consider the way we live our lives in his debut poetry collection, “Ways to Beg.” He examines in awe how far we will go and what we will accomplish in the name of self-discovery, and in the hope of defining home. This collection opens with a poem about arrival, […]

Andrea Abi-Karam’s VILLAINY, out from Nightboat Books, is an energizing second collection. Building off of the signature style and questions raised by their debut EXTRATANSMISSION, this book weaves a whole new grain of vulnerability and introspection through its call. Their debut was invested in the critique of US military violence, of surveillance, via the performative […]

It’s become a bit of a trope to claim certain novels as “unfilmable” – that no matter what extraordinary efforts a director exercises, Blood Meridian, for example, will never be displayed on the silver screen. I’d always viewed these claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. We have a version of Cloud Atlas, after all, […]

Ösel Jessica Plante gifts us a window into her own soul with her poetry collection Waveland. She writes from her own experience and relationships, so there is an added heartfelt layer to her recurring character of the Navy wife and her themes of leaving and being left. Love comes and goes in waves, and we […]

Born in a Second Language by Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie published by Button Poetry is a remarkable work of writing through in-betweenness of body and nation, mind and mother-tongue. Afiriyie-Hwedie balances the languages and nations her self has touched so carefully in this collection. The collection encomapsses an impressive spread of form and style — Afiriyie-Hwedie […]

Carrie Bennett’s Lost Letters and Other Animals is a five segment lament of writing the wrong words, waiting endlessly for the right words to come, the ability to label things slipping away over a span of years. It is a tip-of-the-tongue, edge-of-the-seat collection, shedding light on some of the darker aspects of aging. As someone […]

In sad horse music, out from Daily Drunk Magazine, Samantha Fain writes about and in the world of Bojack Horseman, a show that makes me feel like shit; these poems make me go “aahh yes, this is a good articulation of feeling like shit”; I make both of these comments in the most loving way. […]

Somewhere near the middle of Larissa Pham’s memoir-in-essays, Pop Song, she starts a piece, “What we say without saying,” with a simple statement. “There’s a recording of James Blake covering Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ live, on a BBC radio show, from February 2011,” she tells us. She goes on to describe Blake’s vulnerability […]

It may sound odd to say that Lyd Havens’ poetry collection, Chokecherry, is an absolute joy, when every page expresses a deep lingering grief. Their haunting words take root and take flight, as they float through years of both traumatic dreams and a nightmarish reality, wrestling with painful memories before learning to be thankful for […]

In an interview published by Asian American Writer’s Workshop, poet Kim Min Jeong tries to describe her peculiar style of poetry: “I mean… my poetry, it’s not beautiful. I’m sure I can come first at an ugly contest but I can’t win a beauty contest. I am confident I can make things ugly the best.” […]

What does it mean to long for a home? What does it mean to feel that craving while also craving a 7-11 soda? How many miles do you have to drive and how many weird foods do you have to eat before you feel a sense of your true personality?  MJ Santiago’s new book, Swallow, […]

Divya Victor’s poetry collection Curb digs into the layers of community in United States suburbia, with a direct intensity that documents pervasive assaults against immigrants who settle here. She opens with a personal admission of her own mother being afraid all the time, of all places being the same in their lack of safety. We […]

One complaint I’ll often hear after recommending books to friends is that the work is too sad. “It’s too depressing,” they’ll say, not only about fiction that heaps ever escalating acts of tragedy upon the reader (as in Yanagihara’s A Little Life) but also nonfiction, especially those of political or sociological focus. It is a […]

Carlina Duan is incredible at something that I find very difficult: building enormity and emotional honesty from a seemingly average moment. There are many places our work can come from—trauma, love, etc—so often, I consider a poem an event. When I read poets like Mary Oliver or Aracelis Girmay, I see that we can make […]

Danielle Rose’s poetry collection at first & then is a short and sweet exploration of both physical and emotional shift. In only thirty pages, we gain a world’s worth of insight into a beautiful transition from darkness to striking light. The first poem opens with a suicide, the stillness of a fallen woman’s landing and […]

Ghost Tracks, the second chapbook from Sneha Subramanian Kanta, was published in December of 2020 from Louisiana Literature Press. In an interview with The Shore, the poet cites her fascination with Kingdom Animalia—“Cognitive biology taught in school often disregards the fact that ‘human beings’ belong to the Kingdom of Animalia,” and so her collection seeks […]

Even from its opening sentence, Elle Nash’s new story collection, Nudes, shapes the reader’s expectations. “It began when she moved in below their apartment,” Nash writes, “or maybe it began a week after when the boyfriend came downstairs to ask for a cup of sugar for a cake, or maybe it began a week after […]

A dance and meditation in book form, No Knowledge is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body by Asiya Wadud shines light on the shadows between harsh borders. She navigates not only the rush of the physical world, but also the more subtle flow of time and memory. Her collection is wistfully historical,  rife with […]

The penultimate poem in Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize via The American Poetry Review, is a short piece that ends with a brusque suggestion: “You could write things down just as they are, / just as you see them. You could try that.” Were it that easy! […]

Jackie Wang’s poetry debut, The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, delivers a fascinating mix of fantasy and reality to start off the new year. Many of these poems have a startling beginning – frequently we enter in the moment of a catastrophe, whether it is a natural disaster, attempted murder, […]

Tanya Holtland’s debut poetry collection, Requisite, opens with a preface that softly urges the importance of spiritual ecology, which seizes my attention immediately. She advocates for the harmony and healing of nature, and caring for the earth as an extension of ourselves. She stages a lyrical political battleground of environmental crisis and the draining of […]

Cut Woman, from small-press Game Over Books in Boston, is Dena Igusti’s debut collection. Their work is at its best in its play with space. Engaging with the trauma of female genital mutilation, the loss of her people, desire, and patriarchy, Igusti’s poems are varied in form but often united in their modes of fragmentation—apt, […]

Our lives are shaped by countless obstacles to our desires. Many of these potential obstacles – race, gender, class, and the culture in which we reside, for example – exist largely outside our control. Awareness of this truth rarely deters our striving, however. We continue to climb, to throw ourselves against these limitations. Where our […]

Etel Adnan dispenses down-to-earth wisdom in her poetic work Shifting the Silence, bringing readers along as she recounts her global travels and lessons learned. We are lucky to glimpse her 95 years of life condensed into these pages, and thumb through her thoughts on the passage of life. Hailed as a meditation or rumination on […]

Your body is a temple; so sayeth the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians. In Boston-poet Levi Cain’s first chapbook Dogteeth, now on its second printing via Ursus Americanus Press, the body is more prismatic: it’s “a house / with newly washed floors,” “a pool to drink from,” or “an apartment / condemned by god.” This […]