By Sara Wainscott“My nationality, my accent, changes with the landscape, with the very weather,” Abeer Y. Hoque writes of herself in Olive Witch, and her resolute exploration of the limits of identity—both personal and cultural—give focus to the book’s disparate...
By Nicholas HayesJarrett Neal arrived at my Queer Literature class a few minutes before the arranged time. I was asking my class how Barbara and Jaime acted as a foil for Stephen and Mary in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. We were discussing the way social...
By Jacob Singer
“I turned entirely to provocative fiction and poetry, as I do during all my most desperate times (xi),” Allisa Nutting declares in the forward of The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers.
By Jay Besemer
Aaron Apps’ Intersex: A Memoir operates in a space that is both complex and difficult to name. There is no adjective that serves experiences or texts steeped in both horror and beauty, abjection and awe.
By Abeer Hoque
Ghana Must Go is Taiye Selasi’s tour de force first novel about a Nigerian-Ghanaian family falling apart between Ghana, the US, England, and Nigeria.
By Jay BesemerThe premise is straightforward, if not simple: four years ago the collaborative online conversation called Open Letter was founded by poet Claudia Rankine to expansively engage the challenges of race in creative practice. Participants addressed the...
By Abeer Hoque“St. Petersburg lay under its enormous, grey sky like a carefully posed, regal creature…”Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (LFMB) is Anya Ulinich’s fantastic second book, a graphic novel about love, immigration, and relationships. I read the entire book in...
By Nancy Smith
Matt Bell’s intriguing new book, Scrapper, follows Kelly, a former boxer who has returned to his ruined hometown of Detroit.
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Fissures, Grant Faulkner’s collection of 100-word stories, is beautiful in its smallness. Faulkner’s stories are constructed to capture the essence of longer works with acerbic brevity.
Review by Mary Burger
The Minotaur’s Daughter by Rowland Saifi takes place in a small, unnamed beach town with a lone second-person narrator who relates the peculiar story of how he comes to live in a sort of reverse exile, left behind after everyone else has gone.
By Amanda MarbaisHalle Butler’s Jillian is a dark novel delivered in a witty, incisive voice. At times, it resembles a more considered, more satisfying season of Girls, which may speak to its timeliness.Young Megan works a dead-end job for a gastroenterologist. She...
By Bill Cushing
I knew of Kevin Bezner several years before meeting him in 1987, having followed his writing before encountering him in person. His poetry began being published in book form at the start of the nineties, and for those who have never read him, his latest work, Following the Light, serves as both an overview of his work past and present as well as a look at his evolution as a person and a soul in search of his place in the world.
By Patrick James Dunagan
Few books, let alone books of poetry, arrive boasting a blurb from Entertainment Weekly while simultaneously, and aggressively, declaring the attempt to establish a Marxist lyric praxis. Joshua Clover’s Red Epic, however, does just this. Red Epic is the first of a projected series of books to be published by Commune Editions, a start-up press Clover along with fellow poets Juliana Spahr and Jasper Bernes established in partnership with leftist, anti-commercial AK Press.
By Abeer Hoque
Don’t Let Him Know is Sandip Roy’s debut novel in stories. Each chapter stands on its own, but they come together in a tour de force of this structure to tell a story of three generations, reaching from old Calcutta to chilly Carbondale to sunny California. She watched a lonely matchstick of a fry sitting in a smear of ketchup.
The three main characters are Avinash, a closeted gay Calcuttan, his sharp and dreaming wife Romola, and their son Amit. Each is nuanced and real, leaping off the page without sensationalism or gimmick. Their stories, secret or spoken, are told with a light and poignant touch.
By Heather Mackey
In her essay collection The Deep Zoo, novelist, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet makes glittering connections between art, nature, and myth, beading them upon a string of deeply felt personal inquiry. Allusive and sometimes fragmentary, these essays take the form of crystalline observations, attuned to the pleasures of both language and thought.
By Art Beck
There’s a bumper sticker that I fondly remember from a writing residency in a secluded, artsy town: Port Townsend Washington. We’re all here because we’re not all there. I’m sure other little towns have probably used the slogan, although Port Townsend is the only place I’ve ever seen it. But it also occurs to me that the phrase might apply to nongeographic literary locales as well.
By Mary Burger
Koki and Demented Panda, characters in An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, describe themselves as mediocre poets. I’d be more inclined to describe them as discouraged poets or dispirited poets. Glum poets. Koki and Panda are discouraged because, while they believe more than anything in the power of poetry, they have to admit that poetry does not seem to be making a dent in the forces of evil—war, unbridled capitalism, climate destruction, the rest of it.
By Ann Pelletier
“There was exile all embracing at the center.” This sense of exile pervades Barbara Tomash’s third book of poetry, Arboreal, right from the opening poem (”Light Source”) when a woman recognizes that she is “non-native everywhere in the world.” Throughout the course of the book, we are pulled into a landscape both threatened and threatening. “When the wolves came into the city,” begins one poem (”Relict”). In another (”Floating Gardens”) the speaker muses on the certain future:
By Karen Biscopink
Minutes after sitting down with Mark Jackley’s new chapbook, Appalachian Night, the power went out in my neighborhood. I completed the required activities: lit our decorative candles; searched for a never-used flashlight, buried somewhere during the recent move; veered between spooky panic and romanticism. Deciding to move forward with my planned reading was a fantastic decision on all counts. In fact, the first poem (“Appalachian Night”), begins, “Enfolded by pure darkness / a train slips through the hills.”
By Josey Foo
Hilda Hilst wrote With My Dog-Eyes when she was in her fifties. Translator Adam Morris writes in his introduction that as she aged, Hilst increasingly felt that serious provocative literature, literature to “wake people up,” was absent in Brazil, including in her own writing. She felt there was no writing brave enough to properly treat the banalities of modern life with its traditional values, apathy, commonplace poverty, and violence in a way that would, if not enlighten anyone, then provide a means to leave it.
By Maureen Alsop
A particular energy hovers in any visual artist’s studio. Vivid or dank palettes, otherworldly mixtures, the space around the canvas (once the canvas is extracted), various random patterns—splattered paint on the floor, walls, sink. Remnants of a messy, raw, leveling of intention.
By Nancy Smith
Sidewalks landed on my desk during the usual end-of-semester rush. I had several essays due, a stack of papers to grade, and a research project to wrap up. And then summer came.
By Ho Lin
Whither the great modern Shanghai novel? Beijing has its writers of the moment with Ma Jian and Wang Shuo, who capture the ferocity and irony that infect China’s capital. Shanghai is a tougher nut to crack: gilded, slippery, more bustling than feral, hopscotching between East and West.
By Maureen Alsop
Modernism, the lost generation’s artistic fate, the avant-garde, surrealism: these are historically inseparable from Mina Loy’s writing career. To the hallmarks that denote these concepts, Insel is no exception. Melville House’s publication of Insel revisits this posthumously published novel and includes the addition of a previously unreleased ending.
By Patrick James Dunagan
Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 marks a clear demarcation point in any historical discussion of American poetry, deserving mention in the same breath with, say, Allen Ginsberg’s ’55 “Howl” debut at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.
By Karen An-hwei Lee
Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.
By Art Beck
Despite being a 1977 Nobel Laureate, Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984) remains relatively sparsely translated into English. There are several small selections translated by Willis Barnstone, Stephen Kessler, and others, published in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but these appear mostly out of print.
By Art Beck
Pierre Michon, born 1945, won the Prix France Culture award in 1984 for his first book, a memoir of sorts, Vies Minuscules. In 2008, an English version, under the title Small Lives, was published by Archipelago Books with partial sponsorship of the French Ministry of Culture. Its translators, Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, were awarded the prestigious French American Foundation translation prize in 2009.
By Mary Burger
Hank Forest’s Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica’s Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.
By Nancy Smith
Warren Motte has been collecting literary mirror scenes for the past twenty-five years—a remarkable, if somewhat curious, undertaking. Motte, a devoted reader who absorbs “a healthy mix of so-called ‘serious literature’ and so-called ‘popular literature,’ ” has kept 3×5 notecards within each book to record the author, title, and page of each encountered mirror scene. His fascinating new book, Mirror Gazing, is a lovely reflection on these many mirror scenes and the peculiar pursuit of collecting.