It is a fever dream that never breaks, a self-interrogation that turns and turns and writhes against itself in an inferno of its own making, as is the case for all of us
by KATHARINE COLDIRON Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (Grove Atlantic, 2019), pp. 384 This review originally appeared in the Fall 2019 print issue of Carolina Quarterly. The story of a place is the story of its context, and that context can be … Read more
As these poems traverse the Mexico-U.S. border, we see the speaker’s body at the physical border as she reenacts an illegal crossing, on the linguistic border as so many of the poems have rivulets of Spanish in them, and on the political border as Scenters-Zapico takes on Trump’s rhetoric about the wall.
River of Fire demonstrates the continuity of all human experience—its joys and its miseries alike.
“Time and again Felice shows us that darkness does not have to overshadow our lives and dark humor coupled with a bit of hope might just sustain us.”
by JESSICA Q. STARK Chelsea Rathburn, Still Life with Mother and Knife (LSU Press, 2019), pp. 80 I read Chelsea Rathburn’s Still Life with Mother and Knife in the wake of my own new motherhood. My son, an 18-month-old bundle … Read more
by JESSICA DREXEL Donald Revell, The English Boat (Alice James, 2018), pp. 100 “…Straight path along the dusky path homewards Ordinariness spent no otherwise Labor and bafflement without ending Green corduroy copper hair then eyes Wild with tangling underwood pleasure … Read more
by RACHEL GEVLIN John Warner, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2018), pp. 288 —, The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing (Penguin, February 2019), pp. … Read more
by TARAS V. MIKHAILIUK Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: Stories for Our Time. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett, Ilan Stavans, and Alexander Gurvets (Restless Books, 2018), pp. 344. To review an edition of Anton Chekhov’s stories is an honor I … Read more
by CAOIMHE A. HARLOCK Christine Wunnicke, The Fox and Dr. Shimamura (New Directions, 2019), pp. 160 Christine Wunnicke’s The Fox and Dr. Shimamura (2019, New Directions) is a novel that blends science and the supernatural, East and West, past and future. It … Read more
