Ultimately, the poems themselves in Mask for Mask arise out of smoke. You reach to grasp something, and out comes a letter or a word, and out of that word is triggered a memory of some sort of self that had been tucked away that has been let out from behind the mask or the cage
Letting and Letting Go: Mask for Mask by JD Scott (New Rivers Press) Read More »
According to his website, Cortney Lamar Charleston is a poet whose words “paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present.” Identity, he says, is, “functionally, a transition zone” between “race, masculinity, class, family, and faith.” In his latest collection, Dopplegangbanger, there is a conflict of the soul. The opening poem, “The Unauthorized Biography of
The Polarities of a Black Boy: a review of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Dopplegangbanger Read More »
The first Sarah we meet in Sam Cohen’s debut story collection, Sarahland, goes by the nickname Dr. Sarah (even though she is only a pre-med undergraduate) because there are just too many Sarahs in her friend group. Sarah A., Sarah B., and Dr. Sarah sit in a college dorm room that smells “perpetually of microwaved
Mirrors and Portals: Sam Cohen’s Sarahland Read More »
![[Elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia Book Cover](https://webservices-dev.lsa.umich.edu/multisite/mqr/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Copy-of-Copy-of-Untitled-Design-1-1024x576.png)
Roberto Carlos Garcia’s latest, [Elegies], is a collection to be kept close at hand right now, as every day sends us further into the upside-down of mask mandates and social distancing. In every possible sense, it is an essential bedside companion, be it a self-isolated hotel drawer or hospital room trapped in the shadows of
Exhaust the Little Moment: A Review of Roberto Carlos Garcia’s [Elegies] Read More »
It is the recursive logic of irony—the doubling back, the reconsideration of supposed facts, the coincidences and paradoxes of sound and sense—that explains the appropriateness of Keith’s choice of “insomnia” as a unifying scaffold for what otherwise might appear to be over one hundred disparate pieces.
The Wry Humor of Insomnia 11 by Michael C. Keith Read More »
In A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt blends the literary and the theoretical into a fragmentary and irreducible collection of vignettes and lyric essays on cultivating love, self, and freedom while indigenous and queer.
Across the book, and across the many different types of poems within it, Malech uses her expert sense of metaphor, timing, and relationships among words to strike a sort of wry, sideways-glancing balance between celebrating happiness and recognizing pain.
Wit and Wisdom: Dora Malech’s Balancing Act Flourish Read More »
The narratives in each of the 16 stories in this collection vacillate between the micro—insects, rodents, birds, plants, and the macro—life, death, civilization, humanity. Can Xue’s prose, too, vacillates between playful turns of phrase and deadly serious subject matter to provide a constantly shifting narrative experience.
Through her practice of speculative past-making and insistent futurity, Alsous lays bare the impossibility of belonging in the world as it is now.
Graphic Review: A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous Read More »
The music in this book is generated by a constellation of fellow artists and history makers that Ali has gathered across time and space.
Breaking Glass, Breaking Silence: A Review of The Voice of Sheila Chandra Read More »
