Sofia Samatar Small Beer Press ($24) by Jane Franklin Sofia Samatar’s second novel is an imagist epic fantasy, a feminist and anti-colonialist reworking of one of those spongy-thick novels with maps at the front (it has a map at the front) and, like her first novel A Stranger in Olondria, a book about books, reading, […]

Tracie Morris Kore Press ($22) by Greg Bem “Why do we take it? This uneven display. The unfairness, the fake, the array? We don’t need or eat it. We take in. We play. Where’s the leftover sent away to. Awetu. A weight too.” —from “Consumption” in “If I Re-viewed Her” (Tracie Morris handholding with Gertrude […]

interviewed by David Moscovich Among other accolades, Martin Nakell received an NEA Interarts Grant and the Gertrude Stein Award in Poetry, and is known widely for his courses on James Joyce and twentieth-century poetry. He has authored a generous number of texts, most recently Monk (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), Unnamed: the Emotions (Jaded Ibis Press, 2015), […]

INTERVIEWS Dada After Dada: An Interview with Martin Nakell Interviewed by David Moscovich If Roland Barthes had aspired to verse, he would have written a book called IS by Martin Nakell. Direct from the Heart: a video interview with Red Pine Before a Minneapolis reading from his new book Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of […]

Sarah Manguso Graywolf Press ($14) by Zoey Cole If writers as a group are accused of being blissfully unaware of their egos, then Sarah Manguso is a virtuously self-aware exception. 300 Arguments, her latest foray into nonfiction, is part memoir, part advice, part laughter, and all unflinching honesty. At first, these ninety pages of short […]

László Krasznahorkai Translated by John Bakti and George Szirtes New Directions ($15.95) by Alex Brubaker Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, László Krasznahorkai has a reputation, perhaps not unearned, of being a notoriously difficult writer. His fiction is filled with winding, obsessive passages that blatantly disregard the “artificial” full stop, as he says—instead […]

Catherine Pierce Saturnalia ($16) by Allison Campbell As way of introduction to Catherine Pierce’s third book, The Tornado is the World, you might watch the Motion Poem “The Mother Warns the Tornado.” The short film accomplishes what good trailers are meant to accomplish; you are left wanting more. The poem confesses, “I am a greedy […]