By Christian Detisch A Better Place Is Hard To Find, by Aaron Fagan. The Song Cave 84 pp., $17.95 Un-American, by Hafizah Geter, Wesleyan University Press, 104 pp., $10.78. Blizzard, by Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 80 pp. $24. One of my favorite short stories is “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff, in […]
Against Paradise
By Kylan Rice Black Sun, by Toby Martinez de las Rivas. Faber & Faber, 72 pp., $15.92. The Glass Constellation, by Arthur Sze. Copper Canyon, 562 pp., $35. Earth is Best, by Peter O’Leary. The Cultural Society, 112 pp., $20. In his lectures on Parmenides, delivered at the University of Freiburg at the height of […]
This Long Winding Line: A Poetry Retrospective
Ai’s Killing Floor (1979) Edited by Shara Lessley I first read Ai’s poetry as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine—or, rather, it read me. Read into my conscience, its deepest recesses, accessing things I’d tried to repress or deny: shame, brutality, envy, desire, arrogance, sexual pleasure, prejudice—in other words, humanity. I remember the […]
Spectral Feelings
Scope and Scale in Three New Books By Corey Van Landingham Foreign Bodies, by Kimiko Hahn. W.W. Norton & Co., 109 pp., $26.95. The Book of Jane, by Jennifer Habel. University of Iowa Press, 93 pp., $19.95. The Galleons, by Rick Barot. Milkweed Editions, 71 pp., $16.00. In Memory and Enthusiaism, W.S. Di Piero writes […]
What Breaks Through
Four Collections on Awe By Leslie Sainz A Common Name for Everything, by Sarah Wolfson. Green Writers Press, 80 pp., $14.95. Stray Harbor, by Rage Hezekiah. Finishing Line Press, 71 pp., $19.99. & in Open, Marvel, by Felicia Zamora. Parlor Press, 90 pp. $14. Valuing, by Christopher Kondrich. University of Georgia Press, 80 pp., $19.95. […]
American Elegies
By Christian Detisch Summer Snow, by Robert Hass. Ecco, 192 pp., $16.99. American Faith, by Maya C. Popa. Sarabande Books, 96 pp., $15.95. In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché. Penguin Press, 96 pp. $24. Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts. W.W. Norton & Co, 112 pp., $15.95. “It was a failure of imagination,” […]
Building an Archive of Earth and Water
“I have seen how a person who tells a story of racism carelessly only reinscribes it in the present. I have seen how ignoring the story altogether, as if the crime never happened, also carries it into the future.”
Naming, Silencing, Surviving
“It doesn’t take a reader long to be captured by Romeo Oriogun’s compelling voice, a voice which seems equal parts observer, prophet, and reformer …”
Marginalia: Ron Tanner on Carter Sickles
The Prettiest Star, by Carter Sickles. Hub City Press, 288 pp., $26.00. Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, returns the reader to 1986, as the AIDs crisis catches fire across America. The story’s central character, Brian, is HIV-positive and may be dying of AIDs himself, shortly after his partner of two years has died […]
“Places To Lie Down and Signify”: Diana Marie Delgado’s Accumulative Verse
by Katie Berta Tracing the Horse, by Diana Marie Delgado. BOA Editions 112 pp., $17.00. “Most nights I’m face to face with the stars. / No one is more afraid of this than me. // So I find places to lie down/and signify,” Diana Delgado begins in “Little Swan,” the first poem of her debut […]
