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)
Mule Boy unfolds as a single, sustained utterance—a life in one long sentence—and in doing so invites the reader into an intimacy that feels both confessional and liturgical.
(reviews)
Remains, remnants, in print only, a death mask; just as dead
But in another place. Taxons without Lazarus. Facts
Some data has confirmed. You, among the dead,
(poetry)
Calypsee is the fictional setting of Ryan Habermeyer’s novel, Necronauts. Told through a series of ninety-five obituaries, Necronauts explores what it means to live in a religious community that seems to quell hope and how those outside that faith can still find something to sustain them.
(reviews)
But every so often it goes berserk
And slips away from all control
It injects all sorts of liquids, starts to speak in tongues
And becomes infected with French syphilis or English rickets
Disrupting discotheques or buses filled with children
It dreams of ascension into heaven
(poetry/translations)
Smoke Drifts contains both free verse and poems that follow a formal architecture, including several of Anjuman’s ghazals, a centuries-old tradition that Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov describes as “a universal poetic form,” like the European sonnet, found in literary cultures from Turkey to India.
(reviews)
Newspapers make the best
umbrellas, the rain erases
them. Fascinating philosophies
in my head-hunch over litter,
digging for shit
when there is already so much
on the surface.
(poetry)
but how do you explain a marathon
to those who’ve never run it?
(poetry/translations)
Ahmed carefully layers Nigerian cultural practices into the poem’s emotional architecture. “Where I come from, silence is how you mourn a man without gray hairs”—the line invokes a northern Nigerian Muslim sensibility. It also hints at the Nigerian pattern of losing young men to violence, religious conflict, insurgency, and conscription.
(reviews)
We seven spent most of our days preparing ourselves for the war that we were sure we would soon see. Broomsticks became rifles and stones became grenades and we practiced clearing rooms of imagined enemies in the sanatorium.
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
My first uprooting took place in 1998. It was autumn in Jamaica, and putting those words together in a sentence feels as strange as I felt when I lived there. When I was six years old, my parents pulled my younger brother and me from the suburban township of Maplewood, New Jersey and relocated us to the coastal city of Kingston, Jamaica.
(nonfiction)
father’s Chevy
station
wagon nostalgia
weekend I am
always in
service to
my failed
marriage’s cream-
colored
cashmere
sweater
(poetry)
Brian Strang combines visual and auditory components to his poem “Songbirds.”
(audiovisual)
Sears Tower stands fast and solidly flies. Over its base no statues try to beautify the essence of its vim: a skeletal trajectory, a bold learp of blackest metal/glass reaching, soaring higher and higher
(poetry)
Daniel Rachel frames an argument about how spectacle can override ideology and historical awareness. In doing so, these examples endorsed showbiz over ideology, but what else is new? There has never been an entertainer who didn’t want to mesmerize.
(reviews)
Sometimes, silence is the way oppression learns to speak fluently in every language. When we were told to sit still, we didn’t just lose movement—we lost voice.
(nonfiction)
My sister is going on a limitless journey
Those flying blue atoms above us
Penetrating our hearts exactly like darkness
(poetry)
this, the poem i cannot
return to
this, the wholehearted
downpour
(poetry)
I don’t know how to hold onto the warmth of the image of Ray picking up the kids, dappled in sunlight, with the statistics of suicide that run through my mind as I think about Lizzie.
(nonfiction)
it was a hundred thousand miles safely tucked away
had been years since its teeth had tasted the lock of his mouth
when they murdered him
it didn’t break no it vibrated
changed from key to tuning fork
death does that you know
(Palestinian Voices)
One morning I once tried to boycott mandatory COVID tests as a small gesture of resistance, but the first day I didn’t show up, I got a text message that same night warning me that there would be consequences. It didn’t say what the consequences would be.
(nonfiction)
His cheek, cool on asphalt, shining before he closed
his eyes: the pigeon’s neck, shimmering
(poetry)
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