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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