Author: John Rufo

Pictures of a couple of rows of books on a shelf.
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The Best Poem I Read This Month: Sade Murphy’s “Entry 098 &/or Monday Night Before Thanksgiving or//Venus & Mars in Libra”

ByJohn Rufo

Sade Murphy pauses time in her prose piece(s) “Entry 098 &/or Monday Night Before Thanksgiving or//Venus & Mars in Libra” in DREGINALD. A series of moments—walking down Grand Street, pivoting on Putnam, taking the bus to Greenpoint—become infused with back-and-forth switches of vision, allowing Murphy to double her text. This doubling is literal: two prose blocks appear…

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The Best Poem I Read This Month: Mia You’s “A Solar Visor And A Song To Sing, Preliminary materials for reunification”

ByJohn Rufo

As a result of several wars fought by the United States, North and South Korea have been divided since the mid-20th century. A further division was implemented through the creation of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which, in an epigraph to Mia You’s piece, is noted as a contemporary “viable tourism resource.” Mia You, in “A…

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “I’m Not a Racist”
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The Best Poem I Read This Month: Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “I’m Not a Racist”

ByJohn Rufo

Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “I’m Not a Racist,” published in One Throne Magazine, is an all-too-relevant rendering of “fair and balanced” evil. The poem, organized in couplets and single-standing lines, presents a mash-up of thoughts from a speaker who claims “I’m not a racist / I’m a realist,” in order to uproot the twisted anti-logic that…

Destruction Modes: Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Solar Maximum
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Destruction Modes: Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Solar Maximum

ByJohn Rufo

Solar Maximum Sueyeun Juliette Lee Futurepoem, Winter 2015 128 pp, $18 “Perhaps we continue in the wake of a disaster we hardly marked,” runs the last sentence of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s endnotes for Solar Maximum. Or, the last sentence could be the italicized incomplete fragment: “((when the sun disappears” ending the title poem – an…

Words Chosen For Ourselves: A Review of THE OXFORD INDIA ANTHOLOGY OF TAMIL DALIT WRITING
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Words Chosen For Ourselves: A Review of THE OXFORD INDIA ANTHOLOGY OF TAMIL DALIT WRITING

ByJohn Rufo

The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan Oxford University Press, 2012 480 pp, $39.95 Buy hardcover Of the social, political, and economic issues facing India since independence in 1947, the situation of Dalits has been one of the most pressing. Dalits face discrimination and oppression in nearly every part of…

Becoming-Citizen: A Review of NATURALISM by Wendy Xu
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Becoming-Citizen: A Review of NATURALISM by Wendy Xu

ByJohn Rufo

  Naturalism Wendy Xu Brooklyn Arts Press, Nov 15 2015 42 pp, $5 – $15 Buy: pdf | paperback | signed bundle Wendy Xu’s Naturalism opens with a dedication: “To immigrant parents.” That’s one of the most direct statements in the chapbook, and the eleven poems that follow create such a surreal mixture that it’s hard…

How We Represent: A Review of FOUR FROM JAPAN: CONTEMPORARY POETRY & ESSAYS BY WOMEN
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How We Represent: A Review of FOUR FROM JAPAN: CONTEMPORARY POETRY & ESSAYS BY WOMEN

ByJohn Rufo

Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women is an anthology rooted in a specific time and place. No, that place is not Japan, nor is it the respective eras from which the four poets emerged. The time and place of which I’m thinking is New York City, 2006, the setting in which Poets…

A woman levitating in front of a building
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“Sometimes she is a space” : Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation: Or, It’s the ghosts who will answer you

ByJohn Rufo

Taking up the mantel of memory and elegy is no easy task, but Janice Lee’s new book Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you embraces the ghosts. The text is not so much a reflection on writing, loss, memory, and death, but a twisted projection of those topics. The medium is under as…

“The dead do not cease in the grave” : Srikanth Reddy’s The Voyager
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“The dead do not cease in the grave” : Srikanth Reddy’s The Voyager

ByJohn Rufo

Why do we erase? We make mistakes. Or, different words demand emphasis. Or, we want to return to the beginning. In creating a poem out of erasing another text, we ask questions of the text itself, but we also open up an analysis of silence. The Voyager is an erasure poem by Srikanth Reddy that…