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
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 …
![[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.
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.
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.
The music in this book is generated by a constellation of fellow artists and history makers that Ali has gathered across time and space.
