Issue 79, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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 […]

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Everything, Issue 78, review

In Review: Susan Nguyen’s Dear Diaspora

In her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, Susan Nguyen engages us in a conversation on grief and ecstasy, and how those two seemingly juxtaposed experiences are intrinsically linked. Winner of Prairie Schooner’s Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora was published in 2021 by the University of Nebraska Press. Nguyen is exploring grief as it’s related […]

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Everything, Issue 68, review

In Review: Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen

It is unfortunate that in certain circles, diaspora poetry has become a bit of a meme. It is also unfortunately easy to see why; while some charges against the genre seem downright mean (that it is disrespectful to launder familial trauma as art; that the constant invocation of a flattened, romanticized homeland is its own […]

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Everything, Issue 63, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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 […]

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Everything, Issue 62, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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, […]

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Everything, Issue 61, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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 […]

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Everything, Issue 60, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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 […]

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Everything, issue 58, review, Reviews + Interviews

In 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 […]

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Everything, Issue 56, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

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 […]

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Everything, Issue 54, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: Requisite by Tanya Holtland

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 […]

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Everything, Issue 53, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: Dogteeth by Levi Cain

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 […]

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Everything, issue 51, review

In Review: Spectrum of Flight by David Hanlon

In times like these, coping with stress and change and seemingly unavoidable hopelessness, David Hanlon’s Spectrum of Flight is a testament to perserverance. His poems outline his strength and growth as he walks us back through his own life, showcasing many moments when he was knocked down and stood up again, a little taller each […]

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Everything, Issue 46, review

In Review: Repetition Nineteen by Mónica de la Torre

Mónica de la Torre’s marvelous work of art and language, Repetition Nineteen, weaves its way into the world this month to make our lives a little brighter. A vivid and thoughtful bilingual book, this work inspires readers to consider the misunderstandings and reliability of translating and code-switching, and gives us permission to fill in the […]

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Issue 42, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: SPEECH by JILL MAGI

Speech, a reflective and well-timed new work by Jill Magi, is quite possibly the delicate walkthrough of life that so many of us secretly wish we had.  The speaker serves as a flawlessly observant guide on a linguistic journey, giving us both foresight and hindsight as we wander along a path that is at once […]

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