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Everything Awake: A Review

September 18, 2023

by COLIN DEKEERSGIETER   Sasha Steensen, Everything Awake (Shearsman Books, 2020), pp.90.  Sasha Steensen’s Everything Awake is a poetry driven by the vertigo of life’s work, maintaining a legacy begun by Hesiod and continued by — to name a few …

Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action: A Review

August 19, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Jordan Dunn, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press, 2022), pp. 84. In a chapter on the lumber industry in Man and Nature, Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), the American …

A Long Time to Be Gone: A Review

August 8, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Michael McFee, A Long Time To Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), pp. 72. In a notebook from the 1930s, Robert Frost wrote out a recollected line from the poet Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”: “A poem shouldn’t …

“History / And Fear”: A Review of Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson

June 26, 2023

by KYLAN RICE   Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant, 2023), pp. 88. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno tempered his often-quoted claim that it’s “barbaric” to “write poetry after Auschwitz,” conceding instead that “perennial suffering has just as … Read more

The Other Woman

May 1, 2022

by Erin Blue Burke   Her pool is a private one, a gated community of exercise, and everyone who sees her swimming back and forth from end to end knows she wants to be left alone. Many of them have … Read more

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 …

RealityCheck

April 1, 2022

by Jake Slovis   We heard about RealityCheck from Anne and Tom. They said it had really worked for them, that since they’d started playing, they hadn’t fought once. The evidence of their success was clear. We’d twice had them … Read more

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 …

Proofs of Purchase

March 2, 2022

by George Singleton   My father left me with two pillowcases of dimes and nickels, separated. He left a note atop the bags, stashed in the back of a tool shed, saying he started saving when I was born, and … Read more