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...
PRESSED Simone Muench and Jackie K. White On a sheetless mattress, immobile and undone, I was marked for ruin. I drowned in dread, became a stain, a container of shatter, of “I don’t matter.” I’m told to muzzle that...
"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...
PROGRAMMED Carlina Duan it’s in the way the light moves, the doctor explains, as wài pó’s eyes follow ours in the summer room, as her legs droop over a wooden chair, dressed in the cotton pants we placed her in, her chin going soft against our...