Genre: 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 few glimpses of Hong Kong’s classrooms. When it does, the …

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 the job of a poet to pull us out through …

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 to be impossible. The inevitability of artistic expression thus, more …

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 did Mommy leave Baby on his own, searching inside, behind, …

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 family tradition, a crucial part of my immigrant parents’  project …

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 in the first place? You might assume that artificial intelligence …

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 field of play, a chamber of sudden change.” As …

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, / where that means whatever it needs to mean.”…

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 and the lover— / the daughter is just meat.” In …