Nelson A. Denis Nation Books ($17.99) by Spencer Dew The first so-called democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, Nelson A. Denis tells us in this necessary book, smoked opium and was doubly controlled by the drug. The pipe dulled his spirit and the U.S. government blackmailed him with evidence of his addiction. Denis could make […]
Lawrence Coates Miami University Press ($15) by Richard Henry A “child stalked by death” and an incidental act of kindness in a world without it drives the tragedy in Lawrence Coates's Camp Olvido. The time is the early 1930s, the place California's Central Valley work camps. Migrant workers and their families, mid-level bullies, and bosses […]
Edited and translated by Theodoros Chiotis Penned in the Margins ($15.99) by John Bradley “The [Greek economic] crisis was not simply financial,” writes editor and translator Theodoris Chiotis in his introduction to Futures: Poems of the Greek Crisis; “it was the dissolution of a fantasy of a world that perhaps never was.” The destruction of […]
Emily Bludworth de Barrios H_NGM_N Books ($15.95) by Ashleigh Lambert The glorious trouble with being human is that “the self is in fact / just loose. / / One works to define a context / for one’s life.” The alternative to pursuing this difficult work? “To be bigger and older and draped / in knowledge […]
Richard Reeves Picador ($18) by Douglas Messerli In the very first chapter of this study of the Japanese American Internment camps of World War II, Richard Reeves quickly takes us from Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to the sudden outcry against Issei (first generation immigrants), Kibei (children of immigrants born in the U.S. but […]
Edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown AK Press ($18) by Jane Franklin and Folake Shoga Walida Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s AK Press anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements feels like a distillation of the times—an anthology of dystopias and apocalypses, protest, resistance and revolution. Inspired by the work of the […]
Jean-Phillippe Blondel Translated by Alison Anderson New Vessel Press ($14.95) by Justin Goodman The difference between suspense and surprise, to paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, is the difference between the audience seeing the bomb before it detonates and no one seeing it. But unlike a multi-temporal medium such as film, where a bomb can march on a […]
Edited by Diane Goettel and Anneli Matheson Black Lawrence Press ($16.95) by Rahel Jaskow An ancient Greek philosopher recommended that a host giving a dinner party should avoid reading his poetry to his guests. If he were still around to read the anthology Feast: Poetry & Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner, he might […]
by Catherine Wong Alfie Bown is a new Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC in Hong Kong, where I have been a professor for five years. His recent book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, $11.95) seems to have caused a bit of a stir. Just as the title promises, Enjoying It offers […]
Edited by Joel Allegretti New York Quarterly Books ($21.95) by M. Lock Swingen Rabbit Ears: TV Poems represents the first poetry anthology about TV, ever. All 129 poems in the anthology, written by an impressive diversity of poetic voices, address the medium of television from every angle. There are, for example, poems about a first […]