Reviews

Three Ugly Duckling Presse Chapbooks

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Alejandro Albarrán Polanco and Agustín Guambo display a radical political sensibility refracted through shards of shattered subjectivities, while Enriqueta Lunez’s fierce feminist lyricism offers an unsentimental portrayal of generational conflict among indigenous women.

Ctasy, -of shapes off shore – John Pætsch

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CTASY, -OF SHAPES OFF SHORE, is a confrontation, each poem subverts expectations, challenging the reader’s perceptions and understandings of form.

The Fire In His Wake – Spencer Wolff

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The gargantuan complexity of the human issues at the novel’s heart is a good reminder of the importance of storytelling that is honored and not coerced, believed and not picked apart.

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life – Ricardo Piglia

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His diaries offer a further, and perhaps more fundamental, opportunity to see Piglia exploring his obsession with impressions, and distorted impressions, a replaying of events and conversations.

The Bitch – Pilar Quintana

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It expertly weaves its politics into a psychologically complex story that centers a character, and her desires, frustrations, and emotions, who is not commonly represented in either Colombian or international literature.

The Inland Sea – Madeleine Watts

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The Inland Sea demonstrates both what realist fiction can offer, as we try harder to grapple with climate crisis, and what it can’t.

Ride South Until The Sawgrass

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for nigh-on end of season came the apex of her woe

¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence – Diana Taylor

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Arguably, much of what is beguiling in Diana Taylor’s approach lies in her refusal to be defeated by the negative dimension of critique; rather, she embraces a relationship with political failure, by focusing precisely on what such failure might produce.

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry – ed. Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse

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Collectively, the poets in F LETTER would doubtlessly endorse Rymbu’s all too familiar battle cry: “To make revolution with the vagina. / To make freedom with oneself.”

My Devotion – Julia Kerninon

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Kerninon’s novel speaks to the anxiety of what it would mean to be disappointed — a notably millennial anxiety — and it is here that she realizes a vision for the novel.