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Indigo: A Review

April 17, 2022

by ELLIE RAMBO   Padgett Powell, Indigo (Catapult, 2021), pp. 223. If I were to start the review of this book the way many of the essays within it begin, I would open with a personal story, which by the third …

Syncopated Sensibility: Review of Sevastopol

March 31, 2022

by CELIA LEGBAND HAWLEY   Sevastopol, Emilio Fraia, New Directions Publishing, 2021. Possibly the best advice I can give you about reading Emilio Fraia’s 2018 novel Sevastopol is: Do not let your first reading be your only one. The South American …

Bewilderness: A Review

March 23, 2022

by BEE GRAY-ARMY   Bewilderness, Karen Tucker, 2021, 288 p. In our current moment, addiction is as familiar to most Americans as a regularly scheduled television program. In fact, 22 million people are currently suffering from active substance use disorders …

The Naomi Letters: A Review

February 28, 2022

by MARY SIMS   Rachel Mennies, The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021). Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters opens with a question, an invitation to devotion: “The love poets say suffering is relative, but would they pull a plane whole / from …

Night Rooms: A Review

February 17, 2022

by DONAL MACADAM   Gina Nutt, Night Rooms (Two Dollar Radio, 2021). Gina Nutt writes that horror in film is “a reaction, recognition, a response to a call.” Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion and two chapbooks— “Here …

The Fugitivities: A Review

January 29, 2022

by SHANA SCUDDER Jesse McCarthy, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).   Jesse McCarthy’s debut novel The Fugitivities asks the weighty and perhaps unanswerable question: what does it mean to be Black? Is it a static form of identity which one carries across …

Jesse DeLong’s Poetic Chemical Reaction: A Review of The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook

January 5, 2022

by DEREK WITTEN Jesse DeLong, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook (Baobab Press, 2021).   Anyone who has vaguely intuited an unknown poetic language behind terms like electroweak, phosphorous, chlorofluorocarbons—or even behind the law of gravity– will find a skillful interpreter in Jesse DeLong. …

Waterbaby: A Review

December 17, 2021

by MINDY BUCHANAN-KING Nikki Wallschlaeger, Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).   Reading Nikki Wallschlaeger’s third collection of writing is an immersive experience. The title, Waterbaby, elicits a sense of submersion, and the theme of water winds and slips between the …

Breath Like the Wind at Dawn: A Review

November 11, 2021

by MATTHEW POTTS Devin Jacobsen, Breath Like the Wind at Dawn (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2020), pp. 208. Scary stories are probably about as ancient to human culture as campfires, but there’s a special sort of monster that lurks in the …

Seeking Utopia: Queer and First Nations Embodiment in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body: A Review

October 12, 2021

by JAMIE WATSON     Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Two Dollar Radio, 2020), pp. 142. What does it mean to have a brief body, to wonder when one will truly feel here, now? How much history can …