Reviews

Ten – Juan Emar

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In [Juan Emar’s] work . . . we can discover the possibilities of a literature that both resists and reconciles the European tradition with the rest of the world. It is in writers like Emar that we can find what Goethe called a Weltliteratur—a World Literature–and a Latin American tradition which . . . has vigorously and defiantly come back to life.

Phantom Pain Wings – Kim Hyesoon

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If loss is a small hammer veining an otherwise intact shell, then grief is what shatters that shell into pieces in Kim Hyesoon’s complex collection PHANTOM PAIN WINGS.

Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant

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A self-effacing stylist, Canadian but not, an expat in Paris decades after Stein and her lot, after even Baldwin, impossible to categorize. Who is she, really? A writer very much her own.

Prairie Edge – Conor Kerr

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A member of the Métis Nation and an Edmonton resident, Kerr . . . highlight[s] what happens when activism does not move the needle in the intended direction.

Holy Winter 20/21 – Maria Stepanova

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HOLY WINTER is, especially on first reading, even more “difficult” and “dense” than Stepanova’s previous work, bewildering the reader with multiple voices between the constituent texts.

Cigarettes Until Tomorrow: Romanian Poetry

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It is normal to mourn a dying planet, it is common to feel isolated and embittered in this new era, but the true loss would be to accept such disaffection, to not fight for a better tomorrow.

Yard Show – Janice N. Harrington

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The Black yard show is in dialogue with the Middle American landscape; the padlocked garden and the pockmarked prairie blur each other’s boundaries.

Fog and Car – Eugene Lim

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Characters, like Lim’s stylistic choices, shift and transform . . . The novel suggests identity is a beguiling, perhaps not even achievable thing: just mirror, marriage, and mirage.

Arctic Play – Mita Mahato

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Mahato’s poetic attention interacts with ideas and observations about community and climate, and the spaces in her language are literally filled in with color.

Cuckoo – Gretchen Felker-Martin

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While drugs and very vaguely defined anti-social behavior were often cited as the cause for warehousing kids in violent dormitories, queer youth experienced an added layer of horror, often sent here as part of aggressive “conversion therapies” . . .