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

by KYLAN RICE Lit Up by Chris Glomski.  The Cultural Society, 2017, pp. 96.  In his new book Lit Up (The Cultural Society, 2017), Chris Glomski shows what lyric poetry looks like in the neoliberal age. When he writes in “Lyric,” … Read more

by BENJAMIN J. MURPHY Rebecca Kauffman. The Gunners. Counterpoint Press, 2018, pp. 224. Mikey is going blind, but he is our window into the small realism of Rebecca Kauffman’s second novel, The Gunners (Counterpoint Press, 2018). Though Mikey is apprehensive … Read more

by OLIVIA NEAL Olivia Gatwood. New American Best Friend. Button Poetry. March 2017. pp. 60.  “when they call you a bitch, say thank you. / say thank you, very much.” This is the powerful final line of Olivia Gatwood’s debut … Read more

by TARAS V. MIKHAILIUK David Biespiel. The Education of a Young Poet. Counterpoint Press, October 2017, pp. 192. Part memoir, part imaginative recollection, David Biespiel’s Education of a Young Poet (Counterpoint Press, 2017) participates in two major traditions of Western literature. Unlike … Read more

by KARAH MITCHELL Filip Springer, History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town Originally published 2011. English translation by Sean Gaspar Bye, April 2017. Restless Books: Brooklyn, NY, pp 320 Imagine a medieval town in the countryside … Read more

by KYLAN RICE Gatherest by Sasha Steensen. Ahsahta Press, 2017. pp. 128 Sometimes I like to think of the poem as a child. The poet gives a kind of birth to a kind of offspring, a word. As it was … Read more

by JOHN BECHTOLD The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. New York: Grove Press, 2017. pp. 207 Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, describing what distinguishes good art from pedestrian work, wrote, “the greatest art is impersonal because it shows us the world, … Read more

by KYLAN RICE The End of Something by Kate Greenstreet. Ahsahta Press, 2017. pp. 176. When she reads out loud, Kate Greenstreet’s poems sound like they’re being spoken during a smoke break outside a bar. Her hands are in her pockets, … Read more

by DON HOLMES The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. Introduction by Vann R. Newkirk. Illustrations by Steve Prince. Restless Books, 2017, pp. 239 First published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk remains an iconic text that conceptualizes … Read more