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
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems by John Murillo (Four-Way Books, 2020). Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry: Poems, John Murillo’s second collection, is constructed in the vein of a craft-book, and nearly every poem can be read on several levels—as literary criticism, … Read More
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf Press, 2020). The pages of the immensely talented Wayétu Moore’s memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women are resonant with absence. “We are told that all … Read More
Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak by Elizabeth Knapp (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019). In her second poetry collection, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, Elizabeth Knapp springboards from the pop and political zeitgeists of the … Read More