“The Only Way Out Is Through” When I first saw Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” (1981), I thought I would never watch it again; not because I didn’t like it—quite the contrary—but because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A recent re-watch of the now cult-classic reinforced this idea once more, as I remain supremely […]
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Walid Sadek, an artist and writer who works on post-war Lebanese society, writes of the figure of the “nonposthumous survivor” as one who carries the burden of unnecessary memory, whose testimony is a challenge to post-conflict normalcy and peacebuilding. During this period of mass psychosis, those disappeared or illegally abducted, come to occupy a liminal […]
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Téa Franco’s debut short story collection, You Could Be That Kind of Girl, contains twenty-one fascinating stories that explore the ways in which Latina, primarily Borica, girls of all ages and backgrounds navigate the rough terrain of diet culture, Eurocentric beauty standards, white feminism, and American capitalism. The collection’s protagonists range from a teenage vampire […]
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Rob Macaisa Colgate, poet and playwright, recently released My Love is Water, an experimental verse drama dealing with heartbreak and hauntings. The Filipinx and bakla protagonist, Danilo, disrupts the stage and page with their schizophrenia and longing, conversing in American Taglish and meandering through a house party as they strive to get over a ghostly […]
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I’m thrilled to have author Erica Lee Berquist here to celebrate the release of her first novel, The Servant. I’ve followed Erica’s writing career for years, as she has published her short stories in numerous literary magazines. I recommend you follow her blog: https://ericaleeberquistauthor.wordpress.com/. It’s been fun watching Erica on her journey to publication. Here’s […]
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Erica Berquist’s The Servant is a quietly tense and fascinatingly written novel that explores the psychological intricacies of emotional suppression, perception, and personal identity. Told in the voice of Ellie, a domestic servant, the story unfolds in hushed tones, inviting readers into a private world of emotional entrapment and shifting realities. Berquist crafts a narrative […]
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I will like to begin by acknowledging Christina and Michael for their individual exceptionalskills; for holding me down each page, one by one, never allowed me had my fill, as I lookedforward to the spell and magic, hidden in the coming themes and pages. I am pretty muchimpressed how the Japanese form of poetry unravel […]
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In the final stanzas of “Sanity,” poet Lydia Rae Bush defines her body’s position on the margins via contrast with “the center, / where I cannot stay or even land.” Unlike the poem’s second-person foil, whose position is described as “effortless,” the speaker “create[s] a constellation / with my jagged ebb and flow, // orbiting […]
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Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length poetry collection “Rodeo”—selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize—is a book about the grief of losing a child, but even moreso, a book about the profound love that is at the root of all grieving. Wilkinson, quoting Mary Oliver, aptly defines her own […]
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(orignally published by Sage Cigarettes) jade vine’s unsent texts pile up like repressed memories–the self-proclaimed poet and gender vandalist describing absence as an overgrown plant taking root in its throat, framing desire as a horrific monster. Admitting that “i’m most afraid when no one’s touching me or thinking of touching me” (75), these one-line messages […]
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Brutal Companion is Ruben Quesada’s newest, aptly titled, collection of poetry from Barrow Street Press. A true companion to the brutality of everyday existence amidst self-discovery, queerness, and loss, this collection is a dark hallway littered with small, round windows where light — and life — pour in. Brutal Companion is divided into three parts, […]
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In the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” expanded the envelope of speculative horror—and prompted hundreds of readers to cancel their subscriptions. Letters and postcards poured in with subscribers offering their complaints and reasons, nearly all of them with an undercurrent of outrage at the supernatural events being […]
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Cavar’s dystopian novel Failure to Comply, like all great science fiction novels, is a cautionary tale about the present cloaked in a story about the future. Despite its bleak setting of oppression and control by a corporation state, RSCH, Cavar’s novel might as well be taking place in Texas, Florida or Tennessee in the midst […]
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Bruce E. Whitacre’s latest book, Good Housekeeping, from Poets Wear Prada, explores the humanness of living inside the bedlam of urban existence. Life is full of elixirs when dealing with modern chaos, whether it be vodka, champagne, etc. But, at its core, people are the flesh, bones, and blood of beer. We seek shelter from life. We […]
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It’s a rare pleasure to read a debut and know you’re seeing the author at the beginning of a long, successful career. But that’s how I felt reading Heat Death of the Universe (fifth wheel press, 2023), the debut chapbook of emerging poet Leela Raj-Sankar. In Heat Death, Raj-Sankar follows up her prolific 2022—which she […]
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Twice in my life, I’ve felt the embrace of Trujillan sun warmed-sky: first, upon my return to my home country after many years away and, most recently, through Ae Hee Lee’s gorgeously bewildering debut. Asterism opens with an epigraph from Italo Calvino’s The Invisible Cities, setting the stage for an exploration of the human condition […]
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One thing a reader is struck by in this sequence of poems, divided into sections, is how well each poem stands on its own. This book is about a mother, a daughter, a family, and a mother-daughter bond, bears, like other good books, the stamp of necessity. What sets it apart is particulars, its individuality, […]
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“Lived and died a fat seven inches from your closet / toe. The gray heads of rainwater blown in. I / fought my own omens, their circles” (Moore 1). And so begins Iva Moore’s debut chapbook, Women Collapse into Better, Brighter Artists, a work that deftly examines gendered identity and relationships, womanhood as an inherently […]
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If I had to describe Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle, I might point to the opening line of“白球鞋 WHITE TENNIS SHOES,” “‘poetry of the everyday’ means boring poetry.” It’s funny,pointed, and true, the type of highly quotable line you want to share with all your friends and allyour enemies. It’s also fascinating because Synthetic Jungle feels […]
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Through sinuous fields of color and vibrant textures, Nicole F. Kimball’s striking paintings stand out as creative exercises in emotional exploration. The fluidity and shifting forms of her abstract work contrasts the solid, geometric brush strokes and pensive landscapes of her more figurative pieces. This month, Kimball discusses the importance of art, human creativity, and […]
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A first impression: the poems seem so impersonal as to be deeply personal. Words that resonate: sun, meadow, redemption, tomorrow, promise and…what else? Wandering and moon. A Long Walk is birth and death, fate and will, time and love. Spare, essential, intimate, each poem takes on a personality. Picture a human figure crossing an inner landscape. One thing common […]
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I was interested in this hybrid collection because of its fluid approach towards the concepts of gender and genre. I have a cursory understanding of some of the “inherited rage of South Asian women” that Sindu writes of, as I grew up in Southeast Asia and have some knowledge of associated cultural experiences and expectations, so […]
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Occupying the tenebrous space between dreams and memories, the collages of JC Alfier (they/them) are at once intimate and mysterious; universal and obscure; conscious and unconscious. Evoking both the ubiquity and elusiveness of Jungian archetypes, this poetic opposition between the known and the unknown is brought to mind in La ville qui regarde II – The […]
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Sharp and utterly human, Maria Gray’s debut chapbook “Universal Red” (Ghost City Press, 2023) is a blade to the heart that seeks to turn a personal story of grief into a history of survival. As a survivor and victim of sexual assault, I shed tears reading these visually enticing poems. Beginning with a poem that […]
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As compelling as the richly symbolic, saturated artwork that graces its front cover, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz’s admittedly slim (but no less emotionally packed) debut chapbook, Surrogate Eater, is one not to miss. Part-critique of the gendered roles expected of the speaker, part-reclamation of the speaker’s sexual identity, Yáñez-Alaniz’s chapbook is not so much a read but […]
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I thought a lot about trees while reading john compton’s latest chapbook. Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” was running through my head, but in the style of the soundtrack for Hereditary. Visions of arboreal shadows and sapling harbingers and brittle bark crumbling between blood filled my mind and ran like roots against my jaw. i use […]
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“Words are water” is a phrase that comes up repeatedly in Mina Ikemoto Ghosh’s novella Numamushi. Both words and water have the capability of being both beneficial and deadly to humans, and they both come in various forms that can be observed, deconstructed, and rebuilt. How words are used and examined can change depending on […]
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Katie Manning’s collection, How to Play: Poems Inspired By Games, opens the door to a fantastical world where Monopoly Scottie dogs, Candy Land children, and Scrabble titles come to life to reassure the reader of their experiences. In the ongoing political climate and struggle with the pandemic, nostalgia has become a comforting balm. Longing for […]
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(Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 46 pages, 2022, hand-sewn chapbook) Far Cry, by Tom Daley, is a tribute to a friend passed and a searing elegy of a friendship lost. Daley writes in the Author’s Note that Far Cry is addressed to an estranged companion, Phil Herbert, who passed away unexpectedly in 2020. Though we […]
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I wish I could quote for you the entirety of Julie Weiss’s chapbook The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Listen: “I want to remember you like this, / flushed in nothing but color: fuchsia, violet” (from XVII). Listen: …On your lipsI taste the zesty beginnings of a couplet […]
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Nothing makes a work of art more welcoming to me than a warning label. Like the parental advisories on CDs when I was growing up, warning labels still offer a childlike thrill but also come from a place of mindfulness. Starting off with a subject matter warning, one author’s statement, a publisher’s disclaimer, and a […]
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What does space travel look like from a human perspective? Not: marvel at the technological achievements of humanity, but: what are the day-to-day, boots-on-the-zero-gravity lives of people in space? What new problems arise, and how much of the same old complaints about how bad the coffee at work is will follow us beyond the asteroid […]
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Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born Englishman who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, reminds readers that humans and robots both fall under the definition of ‘being’. Klara and the Sun does not just include the loss of being when devoting everything to serving higher-ups, but explores spirituality and mortality, seeking God when God does […]
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Art is something I’ve always been drawn to. It’s a whole world of possibilities and ideas that can influence culture and society. On the other hand it can be something that looks pretty, and looks great hung on a wall. There can be so much and so little that goes into art making, where artists […]
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The start of cold nights, strong winds, and early sunsets always make November a hard month to adjust to. With summer days long past, and a new year on the horizon it makes the passage of time feel like a physical phenomena. Or it could just be the cold seeping into my bones. Contemplation of […]
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In her new chapbook, Bodies of Separation, Chim Sher Ting examines the connecting threads and thread snips that tie and break identity. In this collection from Cathexis Northwest Press, Ting crafts poems that play with her Singaporean-Chinese heritage, culture, and language. By drawing upon the images and phrases of her youth and how they have […]
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Read Part 1 of the interview here. “Anatomy of a Fish Hook” is one of my favorites. There’s this tension between the lovers but it’s also quite a sexy poem. How do you go about starting to write an intimate scene? What sort of language do you find yourself gravitating toward the most when writing […]
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Gender, addiction, and motherhood elicit spiritual visions of both pain and euphoria in Sara Moore Wagner’s poetry collection Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press, November 2022). Girlhood and Change The collection begins with “Fit to be Tied,” where two girls sit outside on a summer night, dreaming of what lies ahead. They know change is coming, but […]
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“Tenderness is the impulse to protect what you know you could destroy,” is an early line in Maya Marshall’s debut full-length poetry collection, All the Blood Involved in Love. Tenderness—gentleness, affection—also a sensitivity to pain. With immense care Marshall hollows out a world of tenderness in three acts, shifting across black motherhood and daughterhood, our […]
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Steven Reigns’ newest poetry book, A Quilt for David, documents the story surrounding David Johnson Acer. If you are aware of David at all, you may know him by the label he received: “The AIDS Dentist.” You may be more familiar with his accuser, Kimberly Bergalis, the “young HIV-positive woman in Florida [who] claimed she […]
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How to Adjust to the Dark, a new novella by writer and editor Rebecca van Laer, begins in arather straightforward manner. In the first few pages, our narrator, Charlotte, explains themotivation behind the pages in front of us. After a long hiatus from writing, she has remainedunsure of what to do with her poetry, until […]
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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, […]
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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” […]
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Anne K. Yoder is the author of the novel, The Enhancers, forthcoming in fall 2022 from Meekling Press. She’s published two poetry chapbooks, and her stories and essays have appeared in Fence, New York Tyrant, Tin House, and Make Lit, among other publications. This month we chat about her pharmaceutically inspired novel, the power of […]
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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 […]
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It’s complicated, reading poetry in translation. On the one hand, a reader may feel compelled to pursue translated poetry as a good “literary citizen,” as if the action’s moral correctitude were a bygone conclusion. Translated literature, the thought goes, can interrogate and pierce one’s cultural blindspots and preconceptions. If you exclusively read books written in […]
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On the cover of YZ Chin’s debut novel, Edge Case, there’s a branch of tomatoes. The branch evokes at once both a binary search tree and some sort of temporal anomaly: the tomato at the top of the branch remains an unripened green, while the one at the bottom is already soft and bruised. It’s […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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VAGABOND CITY 