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 […]
Read moreIn Review: A Long Walk by John Drudge
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Dominant Genes by SJ Sindu
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 […]
Read moreAn Interview with JC Alfier
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Universal Red by Maria Gray
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Surrogate Eater by Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: blacked out borderland from an exponential crisis by john compton
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Numamushi by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh
“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 […]
Read moreIn Review: How to Play: Poems Inspired By Games by Katie Manning
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Far Cry, a Tribute to a Long-Lost Friend by Tom Daley
(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 […]
Read moreIn Review: The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Blue Movie by Stephan Ferris
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Patterns of Orbit by Chloe N. Clark
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
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 […]
Read morea whole big world of art: a farewell
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 […]
Read morean interview with Justin Cole
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Bodies of Separation by Chim Sher Ting
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 […]
Read moreConversation with Maya Marshall (Part 2)
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Hillbilly Madonna by Sara Wagner Moore
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 […]
Read moreConversation with Maya Marshall (Part 1)
“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 […]
Read moreIn Review: A Quilt for David by Steven Reigns
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: How to Adjust to the Dark by Rebecca van Laer
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Desgraciado by Angel Dominguez
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, […]
Read moreIn Review: Search History by Eugene Lim
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” […]
Read moreIn Conversation: Anne K. Yoder
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: City of Skypapers by Marcela Sulak
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Edge Case by YZ Chin
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Green Green Green by Gillian Osborne
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Ways to Beg by T.J. Sandella
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, […]
Read moreIn Review: VILLAINY by Andrea Abi-Karam
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 […]
Read moreBest of the Net Nominees 2021
We’re thrilled to announce our nominees for the 2021 Best of the Net anthology: Creative Nonfiction: In Bermuda … by Stephen Foster Smith Homegrown by Iris Yu Poetry Fentanyl by Zachary Bond Making Pumpkin Pie in July with You by Stephanie Choi Doxycycline by Rob Colgate AN INTERNET QUIZ by Lucas Peel Witness by Samia Saliba They by Joanna C. Valente
Read moreIn Review: Seed by Joanna Walsh
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, […]
Read moreIn Review: Waveland by Ösel Jessica Plante
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 […]
Read moreIn Conversation: Briauna Taylor
Briauna Taylor is a queer poet, teaching artist, and seeker of magick in Portland, Oregon. She created and facilitated the youth writing programming and open mic series ‘Mind & Mouth’ with former radical youth non-profit MarrowPDX. She leads youth and all ages writing workshops across the city, most recently her newest project, Tender Community Garden. […]
Read moreIn Review: Born in a Second Language by Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin
Joey Yearous-Algozin grants us the gift of the very emotion his book title states, A Feeling Called Heaven. He explores the end of the world matter-of-factly, with straightforward acceptance, patience, and a certain degree of excitement. Throughout this forthright poetry, we are inspired by the realization that perhaps heaven is being on this earth together. […]
Read moreIn Review: Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: sad horse music by Samantha Fain
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. […]
Read moreIn Review: Pop Song by Larissa Pham
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 […]
Read moreBeach Reads and Other Things: VCL Staff Summer 2021 Recommendations
Clair Dunlap, Poetry Editor In summer I really love a long poem: something feels right about taking a long poem outside to the backyard or a park or the river and living in it for a while. I’m planning to revisit Tommy Pico’s book-length poems, and I also recommend putting the new Ross Gay x Bon […]
Read moreIn Conversation: Tariq Thompson
Tariq Thompson is a Black poet from Memphis, Tennessee. He attends Kenyon College, where he is both an Associate & Social Media Intern for The Kenyon Review. He also serves as the Social Media Editor for Shade Literary Arts. He is the recipient of the 2020 Adroit Prize for Poetry and the Academy of American […]
Read moreIn Review: Chokecherry by Lyd Havens
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: Beautiful and Useless by Kim Min Jeong
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.” […]
Read moreIn Review: Swallow by MJ Santiago
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, […]
Read moreIn Conversation: Zuri McWhorter
Zuri McWhorter—born and rooted in Detroit, Michigan—is carving out a place for her work as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Since 2015 she has self-published two poetry collections, Woes of a Well Lit City, and Not too Far from China. In 2017, Zuri started her own lit and art zine for independent creators, Juste Milieu. […]
Read moreIn Review: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza
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 […]
Read moreIn Review: BINT by Ghinwa Jawhari
I am finding myself more able to reflect on my childhood thus more considering the notion of girlhood. I know this means I am ageing, but it also means I am considering my gender: did I choose girlhood, is there agency in recalling my past as such? And what’s next? BINT, selected by Aria Aber […]
Read moreIn Review: Curb by Divya Victor
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 […]
Read moreOpportunities for Artists & Writers | April 2021
Etel Adnan Poetry Prize: “Every year the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and awards the $1,000 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage. Since its inception in 2015 the series has sought to celebrate and foster the writings […]
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