book review

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]