Reviews

Ayşegül Savaş is one of the more assured young novelists working today, a writer whose work has been longlisted for major awards (like the National Book Critics Circle award) and […]

To be online, especially very online, in recent years means receiving an intimate, seemingly infinite delivery of disparate conversations and media, some intersecting or repeating, all alongside hot takes, a […]

One of the most arresting images in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the second feature by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni, arrives in the opening seconds. A Black woman sits in […]

Mass detention and deportation forces many to leave the country they call home to return to the country the government designates as their home. William Archila’s timely book of poems […]

Writing to a good friend on November 22, 1817, the twenty-two-year-old John Keats dismisses the idea that “Worldly Happiness” is something that can be sought after or arrived at. “I […]

The son of a preacher takes to the center of the makeshift stage at a juke joint, hastily converted from an abandoned cotton mill to a place of revelry. He […]

A book can be well-reviewed and judiciously praised yet still be underappreciated. Reviews must concentrate on telling what happens and why that seems to matter. Critical essays can take on […]

It is a strange thing to visit a museum these days—especially in Washington, D.C. I have restlessly visited galleries in this town for almost twenty years; in fact, I moved […]

Ecological poetry is at its most potent not when it explicates its cultural or historical milieu, but when it stages its own inability to do so. Or at least this […]

The first time I saw fireflies, I squinted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. They twinkled in a tree outside my friend’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, flashing on […]

We live in an age suspicious of beauty. And why not? Aesthetic matters can feel like distractions and luxuries in light of the more pressing concerns of morality and social […]

He who saves a nation violates no law. —Donald J. Trump, plagiarizing the character        Napoleon, in Rod Steiger’s Waterloo (1970)   They boast that America is the […]