Everything I Never Wanted to Know – Christine Hume
The experience of reading Hume’s essays powerfully mimics how it feels to live in a world saturated with sexual violence.
Bruno’s Conversion – Tsipi Keller
At the heart of Jewish American fiction since 1945 are questions of assimilation, identity, faith, and the Holocaust. A handful of contemporary writers continue to engage these themes with renewed ambivalence, both advancing and complicating inherited literary style.
Black Observatory – Christopher Brean Murray
A mixture of flash fiction-like prose poems and sensory-laden verse, the collection itself is the black observatory.
A Spring of Poetry: Capsule Reviews
Eight capsule reviews of poetry and prose works from Ugly Duckling Presse, above/ground press, Subpress Editions, Tupelo Press, and Baobab Press
Lament for Julia – Susan Taubes
Julia’s disappearance is inseparable from the gaze that has described her, instructed her, reproached her, bemoaned her, and reveled in her for . . . 125 pages.
Stories are important when we live in a world where the truth is hidden and ugly, a world where most people have so little power over anything, where fate feels like wind, powerful and inexplicable.
Black Studies is most at risk when it is said to fit comfortably—uncomplicated and uncomplicating—astride a business-as-usual curriculum.
Chung paints each story with similarly hair-raising color palettes, but smartly refuses to limit herself to one structure, subject, or genre.
Live in Suspense – David Groff
Prior to the development of antiretrovirals, HIV/AIDS was an illness characterized by suspense: Which complications will I experience? . . . How will having HIV impact my housing and employment? How much time do I have left?
The Kingdom of Surfaces – Sally Wen Mao
The Kingdom of Surfaces is an honest portrayal of the evils of commodification as well as what we humans are willing to suffer through or cause suffering upon for the sake of beauty.