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Review: Dyke (geology) by Sabrina Imbler

Reviewed by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

The morning after finishing Sabrina Imbler’s Dyke (geology) I texted a long-time writing partner to say that if I was still teaching Queer Lit I would add this to the reading list. The desire to include this was not because it echoed the great themes of works like Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

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Review: Etudes: A Rilke Recital by Art Beck

Review by Wally Swist

The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars.

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Review: The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020 by Jonas Zdanys

Review by Wally Swist

Towards the end of his watershed book, The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020, Jonas Zdanys writes in the poem, “Love,” that “Our lives” are “a vigil/ for something whiter/ than snow,” which represents Zdanys as a reverential poet, one whose reverence is that of the harmony of the intellect and the heart (as in the compassion exhibited in the fourth chakra).

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Review: The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet by David Breeden

Review by Wally Swist

It is apt that one of the several quotes from a variety of notable authors prefacing David Breeden’s The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet would include the French philosopher Alain Badiou, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, who writes about such concepts as truth not being either postmodern or a simple repetition of the concept of modernity, and whose philosophy just may be expressed succinctly by the quote used here, “Justice does not exist, which is why we must create it.”

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Review: The Blue Absolute by Aaron Shurin

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

The Blue Absolute is a languid historical symphony. Shurin’s images flow in these prose poems. He exploits the affordances of the prose poem form – the nature of the lines without breaks to drive images and actions through their dramatic transformations. At times, he handles this change with a deftness that draws me back over the passages as a metonym of green eyes becomes self and mother.

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Review: Other Shepherds: Poems with Translations from Marina Tsvetaeva by Nina Kossman

Review by Art Beck

Other Shepherds is an unusual sequence that alternates translated Marina Tsvetaeva poems with poems by the translator. It appears as part of the Poets and Traitors Press series which “seeks to showcase authors who travel between writing and translation” and “views translation as forming part of a continuum with the creative writer’s work.”

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Review: The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (translated by David Boyd)

Reviewed by Anu Kandikuppa

I work, you work, we all work. We work for money, fulfilment, immortality. We love our work or hate it. Often we are indifferent to work. We may never find love, but we all find work. Lack of work shames us and may destroy us. You’d think there would be more novels about work.

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Review: There There by Tommy Orange

Reviewed by Abeer Hoque

“You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust.” I had been enthusiastically recommended There There by Tommy Orange a few times before I picked it up. There are precious few Native books in the American literary canon, let alone the particular and fascinating urban Indian perspective that Orange lays out.

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Review: Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky

Review by Maureen Alsop

National Book Award winner, Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan, is a book which stands up and will not sit down. The collection, structured in two Acts, declares itself as drama, and unfolds a map of living dread within the United States.

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Review: Wind in the Cave and Natural Tendencies by James B. Nicola

Reviewed by Wally Swist

The title of James B. Nicola’s recent collection of 88 poems references a phrase from the imminent American lyrical poet, Theodore Roethke, “My desire’s a wind trapped in a cave.” How eponymously apt it is, since it mirrors the poems that Nicola offers us—as scrolls unwound in the air.

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Review: Actions in the Orchards by Fred Schmalz

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In my twenties and thirties, I felt Baudrillard on a pale horse (occasionally with Ballard riding aside) wrapped the pall of simulacrum around the world for me. The vain specters of symbols without referents have helped guide me not just through contemporary museums but the lived world.

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Review: I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell

Review by Abeer Hoque

I Am, I Am, I Am is a memoir in essays by Maggie O’Farrell. Each chapter deals with a different “near death” experience from her life. The chapters are unevenly written with three brilliant pieces (the first, the last, and the one on miscarriages).

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Review: Becoming by Michelle Obama

Review by Abeer Hoque

I had heard from a friend that listening to Michelle Obama’s Becoming was like being in a conversation with friends. So I eschewed my normal e-book ways and splurged for the Audible book. I wasn’t disappointed.

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Review: The Insistent Island by Art Beck

Review by Wally Swist

I first came across the poetry of Art Beck while working as a cataloguer in an all-poetry bookstore in 1977. Hugh Miller, Bookseller was located on Crown Street in New Haven.

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Review: The Other Planet by Ascher/Straus

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Ascher/Straus’s coauthored novel slips around its dreamily constructed narrative. The story nominally follows Valeria through her relationships with family, lovers, and acquaintances.

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Review: Martial: Mea Roma: A Meditative Sampling from M. Valerius Martialis translated by Art Beck

Among my many favorite books of poetry in translation, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Bly’s translation of the “first modern Norwegian poet,” Rolf Jacobsen’s The Roads Have Come to an End Now, and Edmund Keeley’s and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, there is a new addition: Art Beck’s translation of the Roman poet Martial (40 A.D.-104 A.D.) in a unique and refreshing selection just published by Shearsman Books, in England.

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Review: The Pathless Sky by Chaitali Sen

By Abeer Hoque “People are never as afraid as their rulers think they should be,” Vic said. “Every regime finds this out the hard way.” Chaitali Sen’s debut novel The Pathless Sky is remarkable for its assured and intense politics and intimacy. John and...

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Review: The Door by Magda Szabó

By Abeer Hoque

“One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant.”

The Door is the plainspoken eloquent and devastating novel by Hungarian great, Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix).

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Review: The First Death (Poena Damni) by Dimitris Lyacos

By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death densely layered fragments fluidly reference the Bible and Classical Greek literature. The white space around these passages heighten the stark sense of loneliness present in the book.

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Review: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

by Abeer Hoque“By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly 3000 guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and...

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Review: Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot is an atmospheric novel. At times, the endemic decay of the environment dominates the lives and movements of the characters.

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Review: Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic

By Abeer HoqueSofija Stefanovic’s wry and thoughtful memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is about growing up across Serbian and Australian cultures. It takes place as the country of her birth, Yugoslavia, slowly and brutally disintegrates. She’s an introverted anxious child,...

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Review: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

By Abeer Hoque“Anger is easier than shame.”Ayobami Adebayo’s debut novel Stay With Me is the stunning story of Yejide and Akin. They are a young married Yoruba couple living in Ilesa, a southwestern town in Nigeria. Although the two are madly in love, their failed...

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Review: The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

By Abeer Hoque

“How time plays its jokes. It raises dwarves and hobbles giants.”

Nadifa Mohamed’s second novel The Orchard of Lost Souls is a gorgeous harrowing story of Somalia’s war-torn history as seen through the eyes of three very different women in the city of Hargeisa.

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Review: China Girl by Ho Lin

By Nicholas Alexander HayesI was listening to a well-known author speak when the subject of Alain Robbe-Grillet came up. The author dismissed Robbe-Grillet by saying something like when you’ve read that work you really feel like you’ve put in some effort. And I find...

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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