Book Reviews Archive
Art and Autonomy in June Gervais’ Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair
June Gervais’s debut novel is a revealing portrait of making your way professionally and personally into adulthood. Gina realizes that her identity is untethered to an outside force such as her dream vocation—a truth some of us take a whole life to find out.
Distraction and Delight in Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries
Caio Fernando Abreu’s stories suggest that states of distraction are what allow desire to surface in the first place. They lie somewhere between fables with wry moral lessons and diary entries full of emotional impasses.
Facing the End of the World in Erin Swan’s Walk the Vanished Earth
Swan acknowledges there will be more than fires and floods to wrestle with as the world ends. People will still fall in love and disappoint each other; children will still long for their mothers and their mothers will still try and fail to protect them.
Surreal and Ordinary Torture in Miguel Bonnefoy’s Heritage
Miguel Bonnefoy’s prose successfully bears witness to the sheer madness of torture.
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.
Meaningless Craft and Crafting Meaning in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece
Craft, in Ali Smith’s hand, is malleable. It produces meaning that is disparate from the terms and antecedents of its making.
The Body Family’s Sharp and Intimate Portrayal of Trauma
Here we have trauma in its contradictory particularity, its incalculable aleatory combinations—not flattened or reduced at all, but sharp, salient, and intimate.
A Layered History in DeMisty D. Bellinger’s New to Liberty
DeMisty D. Bellinger’s new novel beautifully showcases the way history endures within us, and how while someone else’s past may influence our present moment, we still have agency.
Collective Despair in Ana Blandiana’s Five Books
The poems in Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s collection offer an uncensored, searing reality of the poverty that Communism created, depicted as an imagistic tragedy from the perspective of those who suffered through it.
Desire and Destruction in Kate Folk’s Out There
Kate Folk’s narrative voice makes even the strangest, most self-destructive desires seem reasonable. Her stories exist between the strange and the familiar, and the ambivalence that characters feel about what they’re doing or what’s happening to them makes them feel all the more real.