Thom’s novel dabbles in fantasy, magical realism, and speculative fiction while bringing its own kind of ethos to writing about trans women that the protagonist characterizes early on as “dangerous stories.”
Do people of color, including women of color among the victims, count for anything more than “things” viewed from the outside, in Gaitskill’s work? Noticed by a penetrating (white) gaze, to be sure, but all the same invisible.
Looming Both Large and Invisible: Women of Color in Mary Gaitskill’s This is Pleasure Read More »
Tariq’s Heed the Hollow is a humorous, erotic, and stunningly heartbreaking engagement with a language that has forcefully made queer black bodies and voices invisible.
Documenting the Bottom: A Review of Malcom Tariq’s “Heed the Hollow” Read More »
Harry Gruenberg’s twisted tale becomes interwoven with that of Lisa and his family, told with fragments of song, personal letters, primary source materials, photographs, family dramas, scenes, stories, fantasies, and dreams that gain their own narrative force.
Speaking Suddenly In German: A Review of Dr. Lisa Gruenberg’s “My City of Dreams” Read More »
This sort of collection enumerates the best that poetry can be: a tool, a song, a gesture towards empathy, an enactment of living a life that continues to baffle.
Artists can be canaries flying down into mines or diving underwater.
Ekphrasis Hybrid: A Review of Harriet Levin’s “My Oceanography” Read More »
“What are we going to do with all those cats?”
Gravity and Waggery: A Review of Bohumil Hrabal’s “All My Cats” Read More »
Sometimes when language is song-like and rhythmic, it’s because it’s coming from a core part of yourself that’s not interested in façade. It’s an inner layer. Like a hum, a vibrational hum in the throat
Sacred Service: A Review of “Without Protection” & a Conversation with Gala Mukomolova Read More »
she stood there, smelling sweetly of sweat, shawarma, lipstick, the several different perfumes she’d quickly sprayed on herself at Sephora, hair spray, and hot love, with its intrinsic note, it so happens, of urine.
Performing Friendship: A Review of “Honey I Killed the Cats” Read More »
Graham is not a poet of language so much a poet of mark and gesture. His fundamental unit of work is not the word but the expressive stroke. That is to say: he’s just another Cornish Expressionist, like his friends.
“Thermal Gestures:” A Review of W.S. Graham, NYRB Poets Series Read More »
