Angela was wearing her dress with the lowest neckline, which also luckily had pockets so she could keep her phone on and hidden and I could hear what was happening. That’s important—dresses having pockets. To women, I mean. That’s the kind of healthy relationship Angela and I have. I pay attention to which dresses have pockets.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
The mirror on the wall was a tall oval, and her head was not. She got closer. Her nostrils dotted the center. She tried a smile, as she had seen ladies do. No good. There was nothing looking back from the glass but the round head of her, the hair plain and dark.
(fiction)
I give her kisses, I wrap her up in my arms, and she relaxes a bit. I tell her how her hair falls just like mine. I know what it needs, I have spent years learning what it needs. I have spent each waking moment learning how to nourish her. Must I spend a lifetime proving that I can?
(fiction)
Despite what is written here, this memoir is not a political diatribe and it is not depressing. By relegating most of the political analysis and history, frequently derived from surprising direct quotes from people like Barack Obama, to footnotes and endnotes, Aziza skillfully preempts her well-crafted creative nonfiction from turning into political manifesto.
(reviews)
How long is a piece of string when all we’ve got is scissors?
(poetry)
If the sonnet really is the first lyric architecture built for the silent reader’s own mind, then an anthology gathering six centuries of its practice is not a museum of formal pleasure. It is a history of consciousness under compression.
(reviews)
There are five sections to the book. One part is titled “Temperature – Thyroid – Denial” and another is “Landslides – Guts – Grief.” Within the sections, Boissoneault discusses the planet through multiple lenses: science, history, Greek mythology, linguistics, and even social
media. (reviews)
I think about the world:
a hummingbird’s heart
Its structure
so wickedly tender
(poetry/translations)
Memory exists as a sort of liminal space, where fiction often overtakes the facts. Burnside Soleil makes the same space of his debut collection.
(reviews)
Installed within one of the nation’s most historically significant prisons, in the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the exhibition collapses time, linking early American philosophies of punishment and reform to the realities of the modern carceral state. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Pyrrhic Defeat asks viewers to consider how liberty has been defined, distributed, and denied.
(nonfiction)
