Genre: Reviews

grief disguised as the rage you cannot name for it is the love you never knew —Mira Mattar   “I have a name but it is not mine” British-Palestinian poet […]

Diana Arterian’s Agrippina the Younger is a book fascinated with the telling of history, with the voids that both drive and emerge from this telling. Looking at the history of […]

In Blue Loop, AJ White debuts with a collection that navigates the luminous wreckage of addiction and its aftermath with a steadiness that never pretends clarity. Winner of the 2024 […]

From the moment that Jean Giono first came across the writings of Herman Melville in the early 1930s, he was consumed. Reflecting on that revelatory period a decade later, he […]

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, advances a strong claim about botanical agency. That claim is this: the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) should be considered a […]

One weeps in the theater, and then runs all the more cheerfully to oppress one’s fellow men.                —Rousseau, Letter to M. d’Alembert (1758) […]

Mirror is the first book by Zhang Zao (1962–2010) to be translated into English—which means that when his Chinese poems look at the facing pages, they are seeing themselves in […]

I suppose I shouldn’t give away my secrets right from the off, but then I am trying to persuade you to read what follows. So, to that end: You should […]

Because I teach writing at a university, and because being a writer is presumably a prerequisite for having this job, I am frequently asked what I think identifies someone as […]