My Dress Hangs There: Three Chapbooks Addressing Femininity, Reviewed
These three poetry chapbooks address aspects of femininity, though a variety of other themes (sometimes related to femininity, other times by its side) abound in each—love, lust, heroism, art, to name a few.
Imagining the Anthropocene: Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire
In the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny cast pillage as a moral imperative. Its rallying cry re-ignited the American founding’s genocide and environmental destruction to fuel westward expansion. Cathy Park Hong’s sonorous triptych Engine Empire reshapes the Western’s tropes into a chilling interrogation of digitally facilitated detachment.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Blood Meridian
Though Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork is neither a warning nor a statement of climate change, it is an imaginative and aesthetic example of how modern fiction can look beyond the confines of characters’ internal worlds to grapple with forces beyond our control.
Review: STOMACHS by Luna Miguel (Translated by Luis Silva)
There are times for sadness and severity and all things bleak, and what do we do then? Luna Miguel might not have solutions but Stomachs reminds us that melancholy is not always destructive.
A Conversation With Margot Livesey and Whitney Terrell
Whitney Terrell’s 2016 book The Good Lieutenant was selected as a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Refinery 29. Terrell also happens to be my former student.
The Refugee Narrative as Ghost Story
Migration, especially for refugees, is a violent crossing. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees and Mai Der Vang’s Afterland, the dead, and all else the living abandoned, refuse to be left behind.
Stealth Animal Rights Novels
As A.A. Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh, “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” The simple act of reading about animals challenges the conventional way that humans impose orders on other creatures, without wondering about their lives.
Perfectly Aligned: Inger Christensen’s Poetry Through Her American Translator Susanna Nied
Though Christensen’s work has been well-loved in Europe since the publications of her first two collections of poetry, in Danish, her poetry did not reach American audiences until alphabet, translated by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions in 2001.
Virtue and Liberation: The Literary Battle for the Mind of the American Mill Girl
Work, and the psychological impacts of work, are rarely represented in fiction, even though America has a rich literary history of labor narratives, particularly in the case of female writers, dating as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.
Breaking Under the Weight of Formula in The Vision
In the recent Marvel comic, The Vision, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta explore the tight rope between narrative exploration and the expectations of continuity in a series about a family of superpowered robots trying to live a different kind of story.