What this book cares about most: Overcoming Being heard Being listened to How to recover yourself (and the world) post-pandemic Folklore, fairytale, and myth as allegory for understanding how goddamn awful we can be to each other and the rage that ensues The responsibilities we have to our partners and our children when the world […]
No Rhododendron (a reference to his country’s national flower) is an intoxicating mix of ancestry, revolution, and familial affection, making for an impressive debut from the Nepalese born poet Samyak Shertok. The poems—some brutal, some beautiful, some unbearably nightmarish—are so full of echoes, allusions, and digressive flourishes they are difficult to categorize; but what is […]
SOFAR is an acronym for the Sound Fixing and Ranging layers of ocean waters, where sounds—like those made by ocean life—bounce and travel for thousands of miles. It is a changeable, roomy channel for communication. Given the depth and mutability of the literal SOFAR channel, it often carries what seem to be simple sounds, like […]
In the advanced blurbs for Canese Jarboe’s SISSY, renowned poet CA Conrad ended their blurb calling Canese’s debut collection, “a field for liberation.” From out the gate, Jarboe’s balanced blend of language, from the delicate to the visceral, demonstrates the struggle of what it means to be Queer in the working-class outskirts of Missouri. It […]
In the disturbance we call America, we must navigate the tension between job and home, between what we love and what we must do, to find balance if we can. And we call on our poets—who spend copious time alone—to find a footing, or more properly, a stance from which to explore, to reach into […]
The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup is a dazzling, disorienting, and reorienting engagement with history, performance, and Indigenous identity. It is at once a display of mastery and a critique of mastery’s inherent and historical violence. Personas proliferate, as do forms. It is a concept book, opening like the doors to a museum. […]
In her debut poetry collection, Asterism, Ae Hee Lee writes, “The Napa cabbages inside are as wide / as my childish hips—rare in Trujillo, rare like Korean pepper flakes / my mother has been saving by mixing them with aji panca.” Her mother intuitively mixes and matches food and flavors from Peru and Korea. Lee—born […]
Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s second collection, stretches the limits of genre just as the speaker’s pregnancies and young children stretch her body, the hours of her waking, and her modes of thinking across these pages. Mothersalt memorializes and reimagines pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Throughout the book, Malhotra seeks to reform the time and space our […]
“I choose right. I choose what’s right. / I choose left. I choose what’s left. I am the one / who soils my sheets and the one who cleans them,” Isabelle Baafi writes in “Exit Interview,” a poem that exemplifies the strength and perspicaciousness of her clever debut collection, Chaotic Good. Throughout the collection, Baafi […]
CD Eskilson’s debut, Scream / Queen, is full of slashes. The punctuation mark divides the book’s title and each of its sections: “Found/Footage,” “Body / Horror,” “Jump / Scare, “Para / Normal,” and “Super / Natural.” A slash typically indicates a binary, whether between opposites or synonyms: either/or; sir/madam; mind/body. It joins pronouns (they/them) and […]