by SUSAN SCUTTI Katya Apekina, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish (Two Dollar Radio, September 2018), pp. 353 Two teenage sisters, Edith and Mae, leave Louisiana to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights … Read more
by KATHARINE COLDIRON Alyson Hagy, Scribe (Graywolf Press, October 2018), pp. 176 It’s unclear where or when we are at the start of Scribe, a slim novel that maps an extraordinary range of human cruelty. The awful, scraping life led … Read more
by EMILIO JESUS TAIVEAHO Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, November 2017), pp. 236 “And what a year 2016 was. Oh, friends, those of you who are still with us, what a year we … Read more
by OLIVIA NEAL Beth Pickens, Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press, April 2018), pp. 136 Not everyone will like this book because not everyone needs this book. In Your Art Will Save Your Life, Beth Pickens speaks to … Read more
by ANI GOVJIAN Ryan Habermeyer, The Science of Lost Futures (BOA Editions, May 2018), pp. 216 Ryan Habermeyer makes beautiful promises of inventive tales drenched in the bizarre and unsettling. Each tale in his new collection, The Science of Lost Futures, … Read more
by KARAH MITCHELL Caleb Johnson, Treeborne: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2018), pp. 304 Caleb Johnson’s debut novel, Treeborne (Picador, 2018), begins and ends with a flood of biblical proportions. When the De Soto dam in Elberta, Alabama breaks, it conquers everything … Read more
by KYLAN RICE Selah Saterstrom, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. Essay Press, 2017, pp. 290 The poets’ rightful mood is ecstasy. Poets dwell in ekstasis—that is, outside themselves, bodies without organs, effusing their very flesh “in eddies and…in lacy … Read more
by ELISA FAISON An Tran, Meditations on the Mother Tongue. C&R Press, January 2017, pp. 154 An Tran’s debut collection Meditations on the Mother Tongue (C&R Press, 2017) is composed of twelve stories. The setting stretches from Sumatra, to the mainland United … Read more
by PAUL BLOM Deepak Unnikrishnan. Temporary People. Restless Books, 2017, pp. 227. A suitcase sprouts limbs and eventually turns into a man. A woman tapes shattered bodies back together. Laborers are grown from seeds. A revolution grows from seeds … Read more
by ANNEKE SCHWOB Valeria Luiselli. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions Coffee House Press, April 2017, pp. 136. Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican writer whose novels and essays are formally complex and often surreal. In 2015, having … Read more
