Reviews

Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides […]

Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s […]

One does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed […]

When my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why […]

Last November I tuned in to the latest episode of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes with great interest. I’ve been watching since I was a child—back then it was our weekly […]

How do we begin to comment on the legacies, dreams, and stories of our ancestors? How could we not comment? What if we never knew a grandparent or ancestor personally […]

What is the sonnet’s relationship to place? Phillis Levin, in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, defines the genre through spatial terms: “The sonnet is a monument of praise, a […]

Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature opens with these lines: “I want to wake every morning into love, / where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, […]

In Averno, Louise Glück’s poetic engagement with the Persephone myth, she writes: “the tale of Persephone / . . . should be read // as an argument between the mother […]

“ ‘Communication’ is a registry of modern longings,” writes media theorist John Durham Peters in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. “The term evokes a utopia […]

The opening pages of Lindsey Harding’s Pilgrims 2.0 introduce a world that is familiar, but slightly off-kilter. A cruise ship is being prepared to set sail, only the purpose of […]

Today in China the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square are a taboo subject. They’re not taught in textbooks or memorialized in museums. Many young people don’t even know about […]