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.
(review)
A renowned poet interrogates his colonized self.
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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.
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Thirty-four houses in thirty-four years, as if the idea of putting down roots was anathema to her.
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Show me a mistake that isn’t avoidable or a person who never makes one. How much easier these characters’ lives would be if they allowed themselves to fail and learn and grow.
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The request to be granted refuge in Britain or the US from victimization based on sexual orientation, religion, tribe, and/or familial ties, as soon as it is uttered before certain authorities, initiates a formal evaluation of the refugee’s narrative, which is held up to impossibly arcane, contradictory, even Kafka-esque standards by asylum officers over endless retellings.
These characters feel like people you might know, people you meet on the dance floor at a Boystown club or a queer apartment party, people you’ve loved and lost.
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“Shame and living, living with it, living through it, living past it. This is what these stories are made of.”
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