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 …
Read MoreGenre: Reviews
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 …
Read MoreSaretta 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.”…
Read MoreIn 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 …
Read More“ ‘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 where nothing is misunderstood, hearts are open, and …
Read MoreThe 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 this trip is reinvention. The Canterbury Cruise Line promises to …
Read MoreToday 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 the “June 4th incident,” as it’s referred to in China, …
Read MoreElysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise (recently released in paperback), is populated by people who hold back—people who have made a tactic of restraint so that they might harbor a sense of safety. This is a way of self-preservation …
Read MoreDelicacy, Divinity, and Desire in Five Recent Poetry Debuts (on Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism; Jordan Pérez’s Santa Tarantula; Joshua Garcia’s Pentimento; Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, translated from Zoque and Spanish by Wendy Call and Shook; and Justin Rovillos Monson’s American Inmate)
In February, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs held its annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Like so many writers with a first book newly published, I wanted to capitalize on the confluence of students and teachers, authors and …
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