Noise and signal are parts of the same phenomenon, but signal is the information the perceiver wishes to detect. Noise is the random fluctuations that occur to hinder the perception or interpretation of the signal. Both are natural processes we take for granted in daily living. Jhilam Chattaraj is an academic and poet from Hyderabad, […]

The Congo River of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The River in the Belly is more than a river located in a geographical region or a depiction on a map. As the world’s deepest river—measuring 720 feet in depth and at certain places impenetrable to light—the Congo, as described by the speaker in each of the collection’s […]

In the “Notes” to Vibratory Milieu, Carrie Hunter describes the book as a work of “maximalist fragmentation.” She cites news media, social media, poetry, film, music, feminist theory, meditation, friends, and dreams among the book’s sources, and lists no fewer than sixty-two films by name. The surface of the text hums with contexts and meanings. […]

“A wound is a place of burial. . . Call the wound a language.” At one level, Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s Ghost Tracks may be described as a chapbook concerned with vanishing, elegy, wound—what is gone and how wound and mouth are intimately connected. The third line of the opening poem “Fifteen Ways of Saying Hunger” […]

Our expectations about what a book is and might contain are constantly evolving. In our current century, readers encounter traditional volumes, tactile texts bound with front and back covers, as well as more ephemeral e-books, texts we read on screens, whose words disappear and are replaced when we “turn” a page. A book of poetry […]

Gaja Rajan writes in the first poem of Moth Funerals, “You’ve heard this one before,” but honestly, we haven’t. Her voice is fresh and lyrical. Yes, she may tackle familiar topics such as loss and growing up, but she does so in a way we haven’t heard yet—by discussing youth not in retrospect but as […]

Tobias Wray’s debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, adapts its title from mathematician Alan Turing’s 1952 letter written just before pleading guilty to “homosexual acts” which were still punishable by imprisonment or chemical castration at the time (and were only decriminalized in 1967—amended in the year 2000 to be equivalent […]

Muriel Leung’s powerful second book is divided into seven parts, each of which are formally and thematically distinct from one another, but which, like a swarm, share the same directionality, hunger, and capacity for flight. And, in fact, each section might be read as an experimental investigation of how different genres can engage variously with […]

Daniel Tiffany’s new book wears a sandpaper shirt, the title marked in black crayon, smeared. The stanzas on the page look like a row of lying-down Christmas trees waiting to get burned. During my first reading, at about page thirty-four, I was elsewhere, stopping to say, “I’m in a grotto!” because for me the dwelling […]