Describing the Past – Ghassan Zaqtan
And I do not mean to elide that these stories are Palestinian, as is the loss they both recall and presage.
Aloha / irish trees – Eileen Myles
A record of attempts at articulation.
I Hate the Internet – Jarett Kobek
This book, a paperback novel published by a small press that features several typos, sits outside this circuit of communication, but at what cost?
Beautiful, precise and insightful, Walsh’s autofictions muse on life’s imperfection while insisting on liberation through the defiant and naked voicing of the truth of the self pinned at a point in time.
The Service Porch – Fred Moten
Moten’s poetry crafts a situation in which the melody stays hidden. He never plays the head of the composition, even if he alludes to the conceptual sphere of the movement.
Multiple Choice – Alejandro Zambra
Coherence and logic are not inherent to human experience. Life is paratactic. Causality, the root of arguments and anguish, is the product of a rigorous and motivated training.
Where is violence manufactured? What styles allow and encourage our conditioning, our reproducing? How to be in systems that place you in permanent states of negation?
A Country Road, A Tree – Jo Baker
Of the four big Beckett questions that have long beguiled Beckettians, Baker’s novel takes discerning throws at three.
The Reactive – Masande Ntshanga
He is an HIV-positive person for whom HIV is operating, surely, as a metaphor.
The Association of Small Bombs – Karan Mahajan
Both this novel and its readers deserve better than this easy image of terrorist as sexual brute.