By the Bridge or By the River? by Amy C. Roma (C&R Press, 2021). “Refugees didn’t just escape a place. They had to escape a thousand memories until they’d put enough time and distance between them and their … Read More
Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby (Penguin Books, 2022). When I was in high school, my friends and I plotted revenge. Some strange guy had groped one of us in the hallway and she was gutted. To … Read More
Dear Damage: Essays by Ashley Marie Farmer (Sarabande Books, 2022). Twenty-eight years ago this April, the musician Kurt Cobain jumped the fence at a Los Angeles recovery center, where he’d been an inpatient for just one day. He … Read More
Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett (Black Lawrence Press, 2021); Besiege Me by Nicholas Wong (Noemi Press, 2021); Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner (Fonograf Editions, 2021). You can tell a lot about … Read More
Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021). When bees swarm, it is as a function of reproduction. The hive has become too crowded, so the workers raise a new queen, and just before the usurper hatches, … Read More
The Dream Women Called by Lori Wilson (Autumn House Press, 2021). Lori Wilson’s second poetry collection, The Dream Women Called, focuses on a woman’s experience—girlhood expectations, love and sexuality, motherhood and daughterhood, and parental inadequacies, among other things. … Read More
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Algonquin Books, 2021) The powerful bond between mother and daughter in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s novel Libertie is established in the book’s first line: “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead.” The year is … Read More
Minus One by Doris Iarovici (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). Moments of regret permeate the stories in Doris Iarovici’s new book, Minus One, a collection of studies in grief, resilience, and the games we play with ourselves … Read More
Breathing Technique by Marija Knežević (Zephyr Press, 2021). In a selection of excerpts from “The River’s Name,” the standout poem of Breathing Technique (Zephyr Press, 2021), Serbian writer Marija Knežević explores the protean nature of borders, agency and … Read More
Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed (City Lights Books, 2020). In an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, the two-term American poet laureate Tracy K. Smith describes poetry as “insisting on a different logic…trying to pull out a different … Read More
An Incomplete List of Names by Michael Torres (Beacon Press, 2020). Michael Torres’s powerful debut, An Incomplete List of Names, opens with an act of loyalty—the kind that rides shotgun in an ’87 Mustang and doesn’t ask questions … Read More
The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Still Life by Ciaran Carson (Wake Forest University Press, 2020). Since the Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed so many aspects of our lives, it stands to … Read More