by Timothy Walsh If asked about Central Asian poets, most Americans would draw a blank. Even poets and professors might struggle to name one—which is odd, since over the last two centuries Central Asian poets have been hugely influential in the English-speaking world, particularly in America. It’s just that we don’t think of these poets […]
Dunya Mikhail New Directions ($14.95) by Julia Stein An Iraqi woman poet whose first two languages are Aramaic and Arabic, Dunya Mikhail graduated with a BA from the University of Baghdad, and then worked as the literary section editor and translator for the Baghdad Observer. After suffering harassment from Saddam Hussein’s government for her writing, […]
Maria Popova Vintage ($18) by Cindra Halm Astonishing in heft (almost 600 pages), in scope (lives, works, and milieu of selected European and American scientists, artists, and public intellectuals), and in articulation (attending as much to language and imaginative association as biographical fact), Maria Popova's Figuring is an ode to the quality of astonishment itself. […]
Aruni Kashyap Context ($15.69) by Michael MacBride The ten stories in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease share a discussion about the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or misunderstandings based on perceived cultural awareness. The stories are almost evenly divided between those set in Assam, India, and those […]
by Allan Vorda Emily St. John Mandel was born in 1979 and raised on Denman Island, off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. At eighteen she left school to study ballet and contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, but one day she picked up a free newspaper and read a book review, […]
Yonatan Berg Translated by Joanna Chen Wesleyan University Press ($14.95) by Gwen Ackerman Yonatan Berg’s book of poetry Frayed Light frames a slice of Israeli life rarely encountered by outsiders. The collection presents a personal story beyond and behind the news: the experiences of a young man who grew up in a West Bank settlement […]
David Stephen Calonne Bloomsbury Academic (Hardcover $130) (Paperback $39.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Although an academic study to be sure, David Stephen Calonne’s Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions serves to highlight an important literary figure whose poetry has been largely sidelined by critical and popular commentary in favor of her sometimes […]
Anna Gurton-Wachter Ugly Duckling Presse ($18) by Isabel Sobral Campos Utopia springs from our mammal form, from the conversation happening across distances, but also in proximity with whom we share a mode of being, a mood. Anna Gurton-Wachter’s debut poetry collection, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, is a feminist affirmation of the multivocality of writing, the […]
Kristen Millares Young Red Hen Press ($16.95) by Douglas Cole “She was merely passing through this world,” Kristen Millares Young’s character, Claudia, reveals about herself in the opening pages of Subduction, Young’s debut novel. Newly dislocated from her marriage and all the familiar routines, of course Claudia feels this way. But what does it really […]
Prince Spiegel & Grau ($30) by Tatiana Ryckman What The Beautiful Ones does most successfully is remind us that Prince is dead. Each page of the book is culled from the musician’s vast archive by Dan Piepenbring, who’d been selected to co-write the book with Prince before his death in April of 2016. Prince had […]