Author Archive

Review: THE LIVING INFINITE by Chantel Acevedo

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What illuminates Acevedo’s writing is how she weaves historical fact into a story that feels prescient in the contemporary cultural conversation.

Review: SARAJEVO ROSES by Rory Waterman

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Sarajevo Roses is a volume packed with journeys, but this is a poet who attends to the enduring as well as the transient, he constructs  gritty, unsentimental pastorals in the noble peasant tradition of Clare, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.

Review: NOMADLAND by Jessica Bruder

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Through folk meet-ups and underground websites, Amazon seasonal packing facilities and middle American ghost towns, Bruder’s book peers into the heart of the modern American housing crisis and lifts the curtain on the forgotten multitudes hiding in plain sight.

Review: TALES OF TWO AMERICAS edited by John Freeman

Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation  Edited by John Freeman Penguin; Sept 2017 252 pp; $17 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Anne Kniggendorf In his collection of 36 essays, poems, and stories entitled Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided

Review: SMOOTHIE by Claudine Toutoungi

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Smoothie  Claudine Toutoungi Carcanet Press Ltd, Dec. 1 2017 80 pp; $12.99 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Peter Pegnall It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens,

Review: HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER by Nick White

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White’s book explores the intersection of southern culture where sexuality identity clashes with religious ideals. The novel takes on our desire to fit in and the dangerous complicity that can result.

Review: OUT OF CONTEXT by John Gosslee

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Presented in a series of “blackouts,” which redact the work of numerous contemporary poets, Out of Context reads as an innovative and highly visual ars poetica.

Review: THE DEATHS OF HENRY KING by Jesse Ball, Brian Evenson, and Lili Carré

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In The Deaths of Henry King, the titular Henry King dies no less than eighty-nine times.

Review: HUNGER, A MEMOIR OF (MY) BODY by Roxane Gay

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Roxane Gay is America’s favorite "bad feminist." She is often read as a black feminist, but her Haitian roots rarely get more than a passing mention. And yet, Haiti is the unseen backdrop to Gay’s memoir Hunger: a fierce, black, female, fat narrative.

Review: DAYLILY CALLED IT A DANGEROUS MOMENT by Alessandra Lynch

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Lynch’s radiant lyricism throughout the collection expresses the post-traumatic tension of persistent remembering and forgetting rape. Read as poetry of witness, the collection is illuminating, for trauma survivors and for those willing to behold its aftermath.