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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So much of Jillian’s life nowadays feels perfectly fine with Mark. Their one disagreement is what they should’ve done about Hannah. Mark thinks they were too lenient, too oblivious along the way. He always brings up the Halloween when Hannah had just turned sixteen. There were signs back then.
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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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They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them.
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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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