Reviews

Black Pastoral – Ariana Benson

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The poet envisions history as a living, breathing entity that we are both beholden to and shaped by—this is not just swaths of greenery, but land that has borne witness to, and evolved around Black suffering.

Recital of the Dark Verses – Luis Felipe Fabre

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Fabre blends serious (but not self-serious) social and religious commentary with punny nameplay humor and mutilated bodies to make a point about how fundamentalism itself arises from relatively picayune squabblings.

Her Body Among Animals – Paola Ferrante

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There’s no denying, in these stories, that having a body means being vulnerable: to viruses, to heartbreak, to violence. Yet the stories also inspire hope. . . . HER BODY AMONG ANIMALS illustrates the insoluble contradictions of modern life while gesturing toward the possibility of redemption.

The Loneliness Files – Athena Dixon

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These days, we’re confronted with a constant influx of simulations of communication, fun, intimacy, activity, travel. But we’re not present: it’s like seeing the world after your death, or a world into which you were never born.

Artless – Natasha Stagg

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Nobody wants to be duped, least of all cool denizens of downtown New York. But, as Stagg knows well, self-conscious attempts at image-management foreclose flights of passion and risk—those vehicles for great art and thinking.

House of Caravans – Shilpi Suneja

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The circular tragedy Suneja draws in this intricate debut is perhaps not a circle at all, but a spring, ready to burst as soon as we allow ourselves the freedom to love across borders . . .

Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals, and Ephemera – John Wieners

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Solitary Pleasure brings together pieces of writing that emanate queer loneliness and longing, allowing the desperate, the embarrassing, and the delusional intrusions of a solitary mind into the art of the poem.

The Traces: An Essay – Mairead Small Staid

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Italy is a captivating pretext for the author’s melancholic reflections about happiness and its opposite, reflections that magnificently cascade in all directions, chapter after chapter.

Telling the Truth as it Comes Up – Alice Notley

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What is a book of talks, a book of talking? . . . Writing proposes completion, whereas talking remains unfinished.

Don’t Look at Me Like That – Diana Athill

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Meg is not one to plumb her own depths or seek explanations for her behavior. This makes for an intriguing narrative conundrum, because what is narrative but the pursuit of exactly such explanations?