The Red Years: A Review by Sarah Katsiyiannis
The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea is a collection of piercing poems from the author Bandi, who writes under the pseudonym that means “firefly.”
Reviews
The Broken Face: A Review by Marvelyn Rowe Bucky
In award-winning Canadian poet Russell Thornton’s The Broken Face, he expertly intertwines themes of memory and place with the metaphysical and natural world, often through deeply personal portraits of his own family and experiences. In “Sirens” the speaker’s tiny son is excited by the sound of a fire truck blaring below their apartment window: “wild …
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Mistress: A Review by Maya Carter
Chet’la Sebree, in her premier collection, Mistress, offers an astonishing parallel between the 19th and 21st-century woman and the challenges of navigating Black womanhood at the intersection of men, sexuality, and self-actualization. She creates a speaker born of the innermost thoughts of both Sally Hemings, the slave and alleged mistress of Thomas Jefferson, and herself …
Summer Snow: A Review by Grace Li
Summer Snow is a rich and substantial new collection from the acclaimed poet Robert Hass. As the former Poet Laureate’s first new collection in ten years, and the length and breadth of the book suggest careful, years-long work. At age 79, Hass’s latest work is often elegiac in some form or another, for people or …
Review of Shahr-e-Jaannaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder
One should never judge a book by its cover, they say, but one look at the sumptuous cover and lovely Urdu title of Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s Kundiman Prize-winning poetry collection and you feel something extraordinary is contained therein. The cover picture is a lavishly detailed historical painting of a wedding, full of people in attendance, …
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The Unsubordinated Self: a Review of Dana Roeser’s “All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts”
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, paraphrasing St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book X. In a revision of Wilbur and Augustine, the speaker in Dana Roeser’s fourth poetry collection confesses: “Clutter keeps / me bound to this / earth.” The things of this world—the clutter of our living—is an …
Native Voices: A Matter of Visibility
The literary canon hasn’t changed all that much, is what I hear from several teachers. They say it with a dismissive tone and an impatience for contemporary work. The fact that there are instructors and professors who teach with this mindset is a sad reality, especially when their occupation bears the responsibility of introducing literary …
Primal Civilisation- On Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Doe Songs: Vladimir Lucien
Primal Civilisation– On Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Doe Songs by Vladimir Lucien I first came across Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s work during undergrad in a slim volume published by University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). The work gathered there had been some of the best work coming out of a creative writing course that the Department of Literatures …
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