The Century’s Quiet Crises
With her third collection, out last week, Éireann Lorsung’s ambition is clear: to conduct a historical audit in poetry of the points of history her life touches.
Critical Essays
The Repetition and Accretion of Violence
Three recent books by poets Valzhyna Mort, Eduardo C. Corral, and Claudia Rankine examine state violence by using violence’s signatures—repetition and accretion—as tools within the text. In these works, post-Chernobyl Belarus, barren American border landscapes, and the minefields of everyday social interactions are scrutinized, again and again.
Discovery and Re-Discovery in Endpapers
Jennifer Savran Kelly’s new novel, centered on a genderqueer bookbinder living in New York in 2003, is a story of intimate discoveries.
The Contradictions of Love in Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang’s stories portray love as having a dual nature, often experienced as hot or cold, and they reveal what can happen as people navigate these opposing forces
Tracing Ancestry in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
Throughout his life, the kitchen was the place where truth always found Michael Twitty. It was where he first came out to his mother. Where he first felt kinship toward Jewish tradition. And where he decided to delve as deeply as possible into the culinary history of his ancestors.
The Uneasiness of Lispector and Klassen Children’s Stories
What makes Clarice Lispector and Jon Klassen so appealing as storybook writers is that both of them make attempts at creating a world in which children aren’t shielded from complex situations.
Stories of Choice in the Face of Climate Change
“I’ve been thinking about archives of staying and going not so much because they reveal some new, previously hidden insight, but because of the record they leave carved in language and story. Narratives like these flesh out the nuances of living alongside environmental disaster.”
Accumulation in Real Life: An Installation
Julie Carr’s 2018 poetry collection is a sort of structure where images, conversations, questions, and all else that is unbearable have been contained.
The Things Left Unsaid in No Such Place
the end of Shifra Cornfeld’s book, it is up to readers to come up with the missing pieces of the puzzle. Whether this silence is part of Cornfled’s practice of empathy or a silent indictment of her characters’ behavior, what is left unsaid speaks volumes.