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Madeline George’s 2017 play lays bare a difficult reality: that any meaningful action on climate change will be uncomfortable, that it’s dangerous to avoid discomfort, and that there are many for whom comfort is the only thing they can cling to in the boxed in world of late capitalism.
Propaganda is inevitably all about power, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker both describes and questions power dynamics in her 1980 collection—from the power of nation states to wage war, to the ever-shifting power that children and parents have over each other.
Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel uses the journal format for its intense relatability, leading to a claustrophobic portrayal of the intrusive nature of societal expectations that never lets up, even when its heroine finds herself pulled into madcap office romances and a time-share embezzlement scheme.
Michelle McNamara’s authorial absence mirrors the lack of emotional closure in the case of the Golden State Killer, both in the historical moment when her book was being composed and the perpetrator was still unidentified, and post-conviction, when comprehension still remains out of reach.
In 1973, Kusama Yayoi returned to Japan from New York and began experimenting with poetry and fiction.
Brown’s debut novel is a slow-motion tragedy, all the weight of four hundred years coming to bear on one woman and the heartbreaking clarity with which she narrates exactly what that feels like. It is a story of all the ways capitalism, racism, and misogyny inflict violence on the self.
Ross Gay’s book-length poem suggests that within the horror show of objectified Black pain and the not-finished history of stolen Black bodies, the answer is a community that holds each other with care and beholds in Black lives not just suffering but life, dignity, complexity—and joy.
The contributors to Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters’s new anthology risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it a collection that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, but also between wanting and voice.
Price’s poems often play with dreams, with alternate realities. Price writes about these dreams, these alternate realities, by using metaphor, by making lists, in which one person, one object, one thought, lives different realities. Love poems here have the names of the dead. Poems repeatedly turn serious.
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