Dionysos Speed – Rainer J. Hanshe
In order to make the horror of it all a part of lived experience, Hanshe . . . does not use logic, rhetoric, or story . . . instead, he lets the run-on lines speak about the non-stopness of notifications that surround us.
Glorious People – Sasha Salzmann
History, even personal history, is tidal. Whether we know or don’t know our own histories, we repeat them. Feelings, relationships, and identities recede and advance across generations. There are tragedies, too, and world-historical moments that repeat with numb predictability.
For all its bleak imagery, ATLANTIS is also a poem of beauty and redemption.
What isn’t to be feared in carrying a child and caring for a newborn, when every action has a potential harm? What isn’t to be feared when a newborn child so upends a woman’s very definition of self?
Search Histories – Caitlin Farrugia
SEARCH HISTORIES . . . uses the form of Google searches to explore the contours of the human experience.
then telling be the antidote – Xiao Yue Shan
Xiao Yue Shan looks at once backwards and forwards, superimposing past, present, and future to imagine the speculative possibilities of the future, and the fragile malleability of the past.
You Are the Snake – Juliet Escoria
If the stories in this collection take on a shape, it is one brick laid atop another, the narrator soldiering on beneath the pressure of the pile.
Coriolis – A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
Formally speaking, these are poems wearing one another as cloaks. They are not fixed in place, but instead carry their histories and seem to remain in process.
Mourning is a recognition of change, and a processual reckoning with nostalgia; in Mourning a Breast, Xi Xi testifies to the tectonic labor of grieving, learning, renewing, reviving.
In Two Plays, Alekar’s sense of whimsy, bolstered by the translator’s ear for colloquialism, becomes an antidote to the intellectually stifling nature of the modern world.