Death is another kind of absence, one that leaves a sudden, big (enormous) wound that gradually heals, or so it seems to me. Disappearance, on the other hand, m...
A woman grieving the death of her child goes to the Buddha.
She had come to beg the famous teacher to perform a miracle and to bring the infant back to life. “...
Recommendation: Read it in one sitting. Give it to a friend. Stay in touch with that friend. Travel to see them, and be gentle to the other travelers along the ...
Recommendation: the perfect choice for reigniting your rage: shake whatever numbness from your hands, there is work to do. Read aloud with friends; declaim bois...
Recommendation: Bring it with you to the beach. Dip your toes in the water. Close your eyes.
Let us join hands now and sing the full hymnal for that most cur...
Recommendation: Not for the faint of heart.
I did not like this book. It scuttled through my life with all the uncanny agility of a centipede, darting first...
Recommendation:
To be savored; to be re-read. Keep a copy within reach anywhere that promises a flicker of solitude and a view of the changing seasons.
Bef...
In this arbitrary assemblage of micro fiction, the importance of place is indirectly questioned. Can a person be anchored by what’s most familiar? Can roots fro...
Look here: this is Lucy’s life. It’s covered in rust, because Lucy prefers it that way. It’s a flesh ball of dirt, blood and memory that Lucy holds in her own h...
It’s hard to pin this little book up against proper scenery. Sikkema throws it around too quickly, like a noxious ball of fire. Poems tumble in the depths of ou...
August, and the Snow has Just Melted is like a collection of postcards transcribed from a melancholy language. It’s mixed with English, Norwegian and some heavy...
Shanbhag’s novella begins on an exhale. A nameless narrator sits in refuge at a coffee house. He pins his gaze to the exchanges at other tables in attempt to di...
One of the most disorienting pieces of prose I’ve read is Samuel Beckett’s Westward Ho. In intentionally clipped and fragmented style, Beckett dissects personho...
Shy Watson’s candid chapbook leaves something to be desired-something specific. It narrates a suffocating crush. A hopeless attraction, detrimental to a young p...
In his 2001 novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, himself a child of Midwest, crafts a Midwest that is culturally repressive, a space in which one happens to...
Picture a little girl kneeling in a glass field. Remember her knees are nerveless and her blood is a myth. If it’s difficult to picture a little girl kneel...
This is a confessional collection of prose. Elysia Smith sits her younger self beneath a ghost light and pulls the most arcane questions out from her ...
There’s much that’s been said and written about the rust belt and blue-collar America in the aftermath of the 2016 election. As a cultural group which—very broa...
Boris is alone. He finds company with his dark house, his chair, and the sea. But he can’t tell us if anyone else inhabits the world. He isn’t able to let us ...
Nearly two decades ago, the critic James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe the work of a group of emerging novelists at the turn of century....
During birth, mother and daughter become strangers. Motherhood is a foreign concept, not as instinctive as expected and a daughter remains a strange, inanimat...
Killer is a sparkling, classified experiment full of impossible questions. The first time I travelled through the book, I pulled poems out of the thick air and ...
David Foster Wallace’s iconic 90s novel, Infinite Jest, describes a film that is perfect entertainment, so engrossing that viewers can’t look away. Anyone who b...
The title of Matthew Mahaney’s The Plural Space invites a question: what is the plural space? The plural space could best be described as a liminal place; the...
In the acknowledgements at the end of The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts admits that the novel shoehorned him into something of an awkward role: “an atheist writing...
There are some books that remind you of childhood in all of the worst ways, and these are the books that our thoughts hang onto decades after we read them. They...
Jennifer Hanks' "Prophet Fever" is a bizarre and molded sparkle in a world filled to the brim with chapbooks that only come close to the success they have undou...
It remains ridiculously important to discuss things like sexual violence in the world at large, but, specifically, in the poetry world, and in her poetry collec...
I am very much the sort of aggressively-obsessed-with-vaginas type who is drawn immediately to books like Elizabeth Hall’s "I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitor...
This is a thing so bodily that it requires it be felt. Indo-Roma writer Scherezade Siobhan’s full length collection, "Father, Husband," explores through the sli...
