Admirers of Muriel Rukeyser have been waiting for a reprint of The Book of the Dead, long out of print, and West Virginia University Press’s new edition does not disappoint. Of course, it’s exciting to have Rukeyser’s seminal hybrid poetic work of social justice in its own affordable softcover volume (with French flaps!), . . .
Read more
In the 7 May 2018 issue of the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson reviewed Jenny Xie’s debut poetry collection Eye Level, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman award. Of her collection he writes with enthusiasm, “Xie’s swallowed commands, shorn of their predicates, suggest that the rules of her art cannot be codified. . . .
Read more
When I described Xhenet Aliu’s Brass to a friend as a story about a teenage girl’s complicated relationship with her single mother, she said, “I’m not really a fan of mother-daughter stories.” We parted ways soon after, and I walked the three blocks to my apartment reflecting on my friend’s quick dismissal, . . .
Read more
Cherokee Road Kill is an important book written by a poet in command of her craft. I first met Celia Bland some years ago in a workshop with the marvelous Jean Valentine, and she shares a few of Valentine’s great virtues, perhaps foremost her commitment to getting the truth down on the page. . . .
Read more
As I am writing this in the summer of 2018, more than two thousand migrant children are being kept at the U.S.-Mexico border and around the United States, separated from their families, as pawns in a cruel political agenda. Doctors and healthcare professionals have spoken publicly about the long-term, irreversible physical and psychological effects of the “toxic stress” detainees experience. . . .
Read more
[an excerpt]
Men and women are not only themselves, Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor’s Edge (1944), “they are also the region in which they were born, the city or apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, . . .
Read more
When I was fourteen, about a year after being assaulted by a volleyball coach, a feminist teacher introduced me to women’s poetry. She gave me Adrienne Rich and Ai; Sylvia Plath and Audre Lorde; Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove, Erica Jong, and many others. Unknown to me at the time, Mrs. . . .
Read more
A necessary tension in memoir is that between the individual at the center of it and the broader context—the cultural or historical moments shaping the author’s trajectory into our lives. Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s When They Call You a Terrorist, co-written with asha bandele, with a foreword by Angela Davis, . . .
Read more
In Oceanic, her luminous fourth collection of poems, Aimee Nezhukumatathil concludes with the image of “a child stepping / out of a fire, shoes / still shiny and clean.”
I encountered this mysterious image on a day in mid-February, 2018. As the temperature hovered at a record-smashing seventy degrees, . . .
Read more
Every biography—in a way, every book—invites readers to examine their own lives, the more we share with their subjects the more so. Jonathan Blunk’s James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the authorized biography of the brilliant, troubled, and influential American poet from my adopted home state of Ohio, . . .
Read more