In Sophie Collins’ Who is Mary Sue? (Faber 2018), the interrogative provides backdrop to the deep problems of privilege, identity, gender, and Collins shapes her collection to surprise as much as shock us awake. And she not only makes the world we already know new through poetic image, but returns us to the ignored, truncated, and occluded voices and persons… Read more →
Category: Reviews
Review: The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo’s second and final collection of poems, The Final Voicemails, has been published posthumously by Milkweed, two years after his death from Ewing’s sarcoma on August 23, 2016. Ritvo asked Louise Glück to select the best poems of what remained, both from earlier work and poems written toward the end of his life, a time of which Glück notes… Read more →
Review: Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm
Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm is a rare prophetic glimpse into a future haunted by the now. An alchemist of language, Wahmanholm’s first full-length book since her award-winning chapbook, Night Vision, is a revelry far beyond what I believed imagination could conjure. She gives us a complete stranger of a world, a planet ruled by its own profound logic of consistency… Read more →
Review: An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
The incomprehensible evil of the early twentieth century’s fascist regimes has made it easy to fall into a trap of thinking—one which governments that send their peoples to war would like for us to fall into—that conflict could conceivably be reduced to a struggle between good and bad. We should be wary of narratives that seek to make us forget… Read more →
Review: The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
In 1891, in an essay entitled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote these words: “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.” Alas, the “new world” Wilde dreamed of is yet to appear. More than a century later, we’re still trying to… Read more →
Review: Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino
Little gal, who knit thee? Dost thou know who knit thee? In “Self-Portrait,” the first poem of Kiki Petrosino’s third poetry collection, Witch Wife, the speaker introduces themes of origins and girlhood in the charming and danger-tinged language of fairy tale. The poem continues: “Gave thee milk & bid thee beg / Slid a purse between your legs.” This… Read more →
Review: Double Portrait by Brittany Perham
In art a double portrait is a painting that depicts unity or extension: the singular portrait becomes plural with the introduction of a second body into the single frame of the canvas. One body must confess or concede its link to another. What is seen and captured by the artist is the communion of two: lover and lover, enemy and… Read more →
Review: The Undressing by Li-Young Lee
In a 2007 interview with Tina Chang, for the Academy of American Poets, Li-Young Lee, speaks to the the poem’s genesis as inseparable from the rhythms of human nature, and from world itself: “There’s no way to account for any thing or any event. If you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of… Read more →
Review: The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai
A deep, unsettling current runs through the work of Hungarian writer László Krazsnahorkai. His prose simmers and threatens, never reaching for brutality yet somehow arriving easily on the doorstep of the apocalyptic. For him. the story is in the sentence, and his sentences stretch on and on, meandering across pages and moods, shifting through phases, at times whimsical, at others… Read more →
Review: Because Everything is Terrible by Paul Guest
Paul Guest’s fourth book of poems opens in a low-lit forest, a slanted landscape with “pine trees leaning in.” Guest invokes Mark Twain: “All right, then I’ll go to hell.” It’s the line muttered by Huck Finn as he abandons his religious upbringing, and chooses not to turn in Jim, his friend and runaway slave. A poem with this epigraph… Read more →