Reviews

The Speak Angel Series – Alice Notley

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Published this year by Fonograf Editions alongside a collection of reissues entitled Early Works, this volume continues, and perhaps culminates, the visionary-epic line of Notley’s work.

Rancher – Selah Saterstrom

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No matter how profoundly the rapist’s actions affected the victim, the man himself, separated from that act, is nothing. Or not much, anyway. A boring man in a boring ranch house.

Love Me Tender – Constance Debré

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Love Me Tender channels the performative masculinity of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie and the restless thirst of Jane DeLynn’s lesbian cruising novel Don Juan in the Village. In other words, Love Me Tender is hot.

The Bulgarian Psychiatrist – Thomas McGonigle

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The murderous logic and hypocrisy of communist rule in Bulgaria . . . serves as a haunting backdrop to this dense and caustic piece of fiction that treads along unsettling nihilist pathways.

Jinx Freeze – Hurk

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Welcome to a dysfunctional society!

stemmy things – imogen xtian smith

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Pleasure triumphs over production. stemmy things lives up to this axiom, hitting the reader with a sticky frankness that elicits both surprise and gratitude.

Metabolics – Jessica E. Johnson

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Johnson’s diagrams not only play with her background and love for biology but manage to capture the experiences of motherhood and a mother’s body that cannot be expressed with words.

1,000 Coils of Fear – Olivia Wenzel

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The tapestry of voices and episodes in 1,000 Coils of Fear are at home in the beauty and horror of their contradictions, a moving testimony to the power of ambivalence.

Harry Smith: American Magus – ed. Paola Igliori

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Maybe he was just in a lot of pain. Maybe he just wanted to fly away—one interpretation of his paper airplane collection.

Beacons in the Darkness: Hope and Transformation Among America’s Community Newspapers – Dave Hoekstra

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Independent journalism is as essential as the public utilities that many of us take for granted. Local news is the first draft of a people’s history.