Author Archive
Refusing Detachment in Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind
Limón’s new collection refuses numb detachment or an easy forgetting. She affords constant dignity to those whose fragilities are too often framed as liabilities, those who can’t (or won’t) avoid the incessant constellating of experience and memory.
The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser
Almontaser’s collection espouses neither sentimental nostalgia nor doomed isolation . . . these poems are poignant and melancholic, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, and always filled with beauty.
Little Big Bully by Heid E. Erdrich
Heid E. Erdrich’s new collection is more than a healing of past wounds. Rather, it is remarkable precisely because it posits the act of speaking as liberatory practice, a difficult action that will project us into a different and less abusive future together.
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz’s new collection is a withering critique of conditions faced by Native peoples past and present.
Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui
At the center of Dissolve, a single line repeats four times: "I breathe it in." These inhalations encapsulate both the rich density and the immersive capacity of Bitsui's work.
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Invoking the “boundless” and the “limitless,” Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular “hum” everywhere.
Review: MEMORY LANDS by Christine M. DeLucia and OUR BELOVED KIN by Lisa Brooks
We might consider that, in twenty-first century America, we continue to live in the shadows of King Philip’s War. Both DeLucia and Brooks have given us important new frameworks through which to explore the wider nature of those shadows.