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.
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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.
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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.
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Memory exists as a sort of liminal space, where fiction often overtakes the facts. Burnside Soleil makes the same space of his debut collection.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Much more than a litany of tribulations, this book deconstructs the persona that Carrell and women going back to the beginning of Mormonism have been forced to create to endure its grinding mortifications. Unlike most of these women, Carrell extricates herself, but not without a lasting emotional trauma.
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Just announced as a finalist for the Forward INDIES Book of the Year 2025, The Plan of Chicago marks Pearce’s foray into publishing a full collection of fiction under his own name—though he’s a ghostwriter by trade and has penned over twenty nonfiction books.
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To read Södergran’s work today is to easily contextualize her voice within a feminist discourse, but it also defies being so neatly categorized. What makes her poems feel timeless is exactly their resistance to any niche delineation of time’s cultural productions.
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The poems refuse to dramatize feeling when intimacy is already present, letting proximity, stillness, and ordinary action carry the weight. Moments of connection are often pared down rather than heightened. After intimacy is established through shared gestures—errand talk, side-by-side movement, unremarkable speech—“Greenlight” concludes simply: “Nothing much happened.
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This identity transformation, and the inherent tensions of being a mother-writer, inform the poet’s search for a medium that can contain the impossibility of it all. Its pulsing, chimeric quality is reflected against, and through, the structure and constraints of poetry.
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As an act of space-making, Dandelion is a forum for Bainbridge to let memories reverberate and echo across a “sprawling archive of emotions.” And speaking of archives (and archivists), as a stylist, Bainbridge’s writing deserves comparison with the rhythms and cadences of Carmen Maria Machado.
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The speaker’s estrangement from her parents and her ancestral culture carries over to relationships with lovers and friends. The book contains moments of broad and icy humor, which reflect uneasily on her difficulty in forming intimate relationships.
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The government, monet notes, will try to spin a different narrative—that of the domestic terrorist, the outside agitator, the paid protestor. That’s why it’s important to write and share, to maintain the presence and livelihood of resistance.
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How does one write about the very things that defy language—things like loss, sorrow, not to mention potential words from the past that went unsaid? How does one convey language-defiant notions through language? For Heller, such linguistically impossible truths are conveyed with metaphor and story, but also with silences, approximations, and fragments.
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If we look more closely, we see the doll’s skin marked by chips in the paint—traces of violence that our girl has survived—her searing blue eyes defiantly looking toward the sky, or at least something higher than where she is now.
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The book’s title is derived from the story “Stormchasers,” in which a couple that moved cities constantly compares the two places while trying to establish a routine. They admit to having “hurricane envy” as they realize that a coming storm won’t really impact them, despite their preparations.
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In both concept and practice, we ask a great deal of the field, making it an adaptable metaphor in poetry and art: the open field, the blank page, the blank canvas. The field suggests potential, something unspoiled and limitless where growth is inevitable.
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If God appears on these pages, it is in the sacred clarity of the concrete detail. The speaker as a young girl, drawing ankhs and peace signs in the back of her bible, listening to a hymn as it slides beneath the pews.
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Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
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Shiki wrote haiku—tens of thousands of haiku—elevating himself to the immortal ranks of Bashō, Issa, and his personal hero, Buson. However, Shiki did not want to go back to the past and its masters; he wanted to reinvent what he believed was a dying art.
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The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
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This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting book reviews every weekday.
Supposing there was any lingering hope that the modal interventions of capitalism might deliver us, as a whole, into a brighter, more sustainable future, well, Gilbert’s poems are here to announce the ethical insolvency of that hope—or, not only are we totally, irrevocably fucked, but the severe degree to which we are fucked has already reshaped our ecology, our futurity, our reality.
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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.
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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.
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A renowned poet interrogates his colonized self.
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Another Chicago Magazine 