When I first sat down to write about heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s fifth poetry collection Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric, I didn’t know where to begin — not because this collection fails to give its readers an entry point into the text, but because...
Although short stories are often sites of some of the most intellectual and formal experimentations in literature, their authors must still possess the skills of more conventional storytellers. The short story is a fickle form, challenging our ideas about narrative,...
By Joy Priest Blacksburg, VA: Noemi Press, 2017. 100 pages. $15. In her 2017 collection, Beast Meridian, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal creates a liberatory cosmology and common sense for her brown girl speaker, who is trapped in the “assimilation rooms” of the United...
The New *There*: The Politics of Access in Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve Jay Deshpande Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019. 80 pages. $16.00 Reading contemporary poetry, we tend to treat the speaking I as the key to understanding questions of identity. But...
"What I mean is”: On Nina Boutsikaris’s I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych Austyn Gaffney New York: Black Lawrence Press, 2019. 140 pages. $16.95 Nina Boutsikaris is a sieve. What I mean is, in her first book, the memoir I’m Trying to Tell You I’m...
Rewriting the Technicolor Narrative: A Review of Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus Dorothy Chan Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. 119 pages. $16.00 Sex. Surveillance. Survival. Sally Wen Mao’s second poetry collection, Oculus takes the reader on a cinematic passage from...
Millennials Killed This Book Review Katie Burgess On Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better (Europa Editions, 2015). Whenever I read the news now (which is never, if I can help it), I feel thankful not to be a millennial. They’re killing chain restaurants, department...