Yvan Alagbé New York Review Comics ($29.95) by Spencer Dew How to speak of courage or cowardice in the context of colonialism? Are these part of what Fanon dismissed as “white values,” part of the broader epistemological and ethical toolkit settlers hauled from the metropole and used to bash in the minds of those they […]
Tom Perrotta Scribner ($16.99) by Esther Fishman In the first few pages of Tom Perrotta’s new novel Mrs. Fletcher, the titled character, Eve Fletcher, posts a picture to Facebook of her van loaded with new stuff for her son’s dorm room. “So excited and proud. First day of college.” Her son, however, is not in […]
Pax Americana Kurt Baumeister Stalking Horse Press ($19.99) Live from Medicine Park Constance Squires Univ. of Oklahoma Press ($19.95) Live from Medicine Park is a pure distillation of the dream that is America, one with little time to waste on the clichéd façade of hard work and success we so often associate with that dream. […]
Orlando Sandra Simonds Wave Books ($18) Yeah No Jane Gregory The Song Cave ($17.95) Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in Twelve Parts Deborah Meadows BlazeVOX ($18) by Greg Bem What is being written in books in 2018? What is being written in books of poetry in 2018? What are feminist voices saying in these books? […]
Interviewed by Michelle Lewis In voice, form, and content, Peter Mishler’s Fludde (Sarabande Books, $14.95) is a debut collection that feels driven into existence by the present moment. Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde is an empirical and moral interrogation of contemporary American culture but employs […]
Ellen Doré Watson Alice James Books ($15.95) by Teresa Castellitto Ellen Doré Watson’s latest poetry collection, pray me stay eager, is a meditation on the myriad ways the passage of time can be humorous, engaging, and devastating. Watson’s implementation of poetic form is as diverse as the range of experiences she explores; she moves quickly […]
John Canaday University of New Mexico Press ($19.95) by John Bradley “Longing to repeat God’s opening salvo, ‘Let there be . . . ,’ / they roughed out doomsday.” This is the voice of journalist William Laurence in “Medialog: William Laurence,” the opening poem of Critical Assembly, describing those who created the first atomic bomb. […]
Will Aitken University of Regina Press ($20) by W. C. Bamberger In 2012, Anne Carson published Antigonick, a translation of Sophokles’ Antigone that is humorous in some places and Beckett-like in others. In 2014, she received a request from the Belgian director Ivo van Hove to do a more traditional translation, one that specifically fleshed […]
Interviewed by Erin Lewenauer The skill of a scientist and the gentle impressions of a keen observer meld in Amy P. Knight's absorbing debut Lost, Almost (Engine Books, $14.95). Selected as winner of the Engine Books Fiction Prize by Rebecca Makkai, Knight's novel tells the story of the very singular Adam Brooks, a physicist whose […]
Ben Kostival Radial Books ($14) by Paul Buhle The “proletarian novel,” so often praised for its vision and more often cursed for its supposed literary inadequacies, seems to be destined for perpetual renewal. In his saga of class warfare in a mining village of Colorado of the 1910s, novelist Ben Kostival offers us a new […]