The poet writes of boxes, or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her prose poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb meaning “to flaunt” in her own code of language.
(reviews)
Rarely do we see the history of the Revolutionary War and Founding era considered in the context of Midwestern history. Most commonly, this time period’s impact on the Midwest is simply ignored…
(reviews)
Cris Mazza’s ruminations, on full display, are provocative and frequently resonant of the shared problems we women must reckon with. She challenges us to refuse to be victims, she confides a hundred petty aversions it’s satisfying to recognize.
(reviews)
“Death and” is ultimately an epic fable about the relationship between its autobiographical speaker and the figure of Death as the speaker navigates plague, loss, precarious labor (sexual, manual, gig economy), and trans experience.
Harvey’s book is like a collection of deeply intimate fables: fables that explore the past and present, familial relationships, nostalgia, and the ephemeral nature of life’s tragedies.
(reviews)
Nothing is so dangerous as a news report wherein Palestinians die in the passive voice, the horrific violence massaged into meaningless oblivion, the perpetrators somehow irrelevant.
Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
Barnett stretches meaning in other poems to include celestial bodies and space programs as astronomical murmurs, and hauntings as the murmured warnings of systemic racism.
(review)
A renowned poet interrogates his colonized self.
(review)
The novel is stamped with an epigraph: a quote from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. There’s an alchemy between the novel and the song that should not be overlooked—it adds an eeriness to Gråbøl’s profound yet distant prose as if the true emotion of the writing has been blunted by fear or pills.
(review)
