Imaginary Museums – Nicolette Polek
Polek allows her characters — and therefore herself — to face the fear of futility that lurks everywhere in her exhibits. But there is a real grace in this devastation, too. Alongside the grace, stories like these provide that fizzy tincture of strangeness and humanity that every reader I know lives for.
In this first outing, McCombs struggles toward spiritual frenzy, struggles toward total casualness, struggles toward artificial grace.
The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary – Molly Reid
Which animal is on the brink of rapture?
I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood – Tiana Clark
Figurative language reaches towards the physical embodiment of feeling, animating words on the page.
Socialist Realism – Trisha Low
Maybe this is, more than anything else, about a series of starting points. We have not started fighting yet.
Mostly Dead Things – Kristen Arnett
What Arnett’s debut aspires to is the act of holding, tightly and gently all at once, to the mostly dead things, and not letting go.
Exquisite Mariposa – Fiona Alison Duncan
Its first bites taste like mainstream contemporary fiction; they go down easy, like candy, or like a Sally Rooney novel. But as you continue to chew — because this novel is chewy — you encounter something quite different.
Autobiography of Horse – Jenifer Sang Eun Park
Maybe the horse is fucking with her.
When the ranks of climate refugees grow steadily, new ways of structuring our lives will have to be tested.
Crosslight for Youngbird – Asiya Wadud
Wadud’s poems of witness are far less remote than one might expect of an often commemorative tradition, underwritten by a deep physical sympathy.