There is a lyrical lilt to Jennifer Soong’s recent book, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit), one could find familiar, yet it meanders from kept usual quarters, the work converses with the breeze, its specificity disarming. Soong’s poems shift us here, there, then back—changed, “moving the meaning again and again away from us.” Her collection in three tempos carries the reader across the span of many-faced moons. Her words reverberate and emit a crosswind memory of what once was, woven with breath, with silence, with tumbled currents “crashing on an adjacent rock.”
A Review of Rachel James’s “An Eros Encyclopedia”
Published as a part of Wendy’s Subway Passage Series in September 2022, Rachel James’s debut book of poetry strips any skepticism about the expressive limits of sex and death with dissident and magnetic indulgence in the peculiarities of desire.
Miracle as Archive and Event: A Review of Renee Gladman’s “Plans for Sentences”
The concept of the line that runs through a line of text is just that—a concept independent of its communications. That conceptual value is uncannily visualizable in Gladman’s drawings, which sometimes flash approximations of words or phrases. The “languageness” of the drawings is radiant but unintelligible.
“AT WHAT POINT DID YOU REALIZE THERE WAS SOMETHING VERY VERY WRONG?”: A Review of Andrea Abi-Karam’s EXTRATRANSMISSION
Andrea Abi-Karam’s debut poetry collection, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), takes on military exploitation of human and animal bodies, the scourge of bro culture, and the Uber-fication of urban space. Their forceful, often capslocked lines pursue a “poetry of directness” in opposition to the pervasive, unrippling “language of avoidance” that […]
A Review of Simone White’s “Of Being Dispersed”
I maintain dominion over the crevices of myself, deep into the layers of my skin, which must never be questioned. Never doubt that these crevices extend toward an infinitely receding boundary. Come close to me to feel it. The last time I encountered Simone White was in the summer 2016 […]
Still Thrumming in My Brain: A Review of Anthony Madrid’s “Try Never”
Try Never By Anthony Madrid Canarium Books – 2017 I first saw Anthony Madrid read alongside Michael Robbins and Paige Ackerson-Kiely in Brooklyn one summer afternoon, in a bookstore by a church undergoing repairs, scaffolding wreathing the brown steeple. I only knew of Robbins, whose book, Alien Vs. Predator (Penguin, […]
Review: The Hideout by Egon Hostovský
The Hideout, by Egon Hostovský, was first published in the U.S. in 1945, and now has been reissued by Pushkin Press in an English translation by Fern Long. The novel – really more of a novella, at roughly 120 pages – consists of one extended epistolary soliloquy-cum-confession-cum-suicide note. The writer […]
Review: Skeleton Coast by Elizabeth Arnold
Skeleton Coast (Flood Editions) opens with an epigraph from George Herbert’s 17th century poem, “The Temper (I).” Herbert’s poem recounts his soul’s ecstasy and anguish, begging of God, “rack me not to such a vast extent,” but, in the stanza Elizabeth Arnold quotes, Herbert submits to God’s torture: “Stretch or […]