Reviews

A trace is a small, but non-negligible amount of a thing implying a larger amalgam of it elsewhere. A trace is a presence, however miniscule, that points away from itself toward an absence. Say, a fallen autumn leaf that conjures …

Cheat with the wrong woman, and you may find a bunny boiling in your kitchen. Such is the enduring legacy of 1987’s Fatal Attraction and fount of the shorthand for modern infidelity’s consequences. The 2023 television series of the same …

Both of Alison Rumfitt’s novels open with a content warning. As well as flagging potentially distressing material, these warnings function as upfront statements of Aboutness. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is a book about two things, primarily, and those things …

I keep fighting off awareness that my imaginative life has been stuck in a rut for a long time. When one dismisses specific contemporary volumes of poetry, one can blame the authors. When one persistently rejects such poetry, one has …

Scene 1

A small, stuffy bedroom in a boardinghouse called the Palace, window thrown open to the desert night. Two men have reunited after meeting nearly a decade ago when both were committed to a mental hospital, where they knew …

I begin this review of Kazim Ali’s latest book, Sukun: New and Selected Poems, while attempting to process the daily news coming out of Palestine. I am thinking of Ali’s work alongside another recent book, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays …

In the first chapter of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Charlie Hailey defines the porch as a place of meeting and exchange: “Porch is that place where inside and outside mix, where architecture’s edges encounter climate, …

“Well, it was a sort of bet,” recalled Tom Phillips, decades later. “I was in a furniture shop with a friend, R. B. Kitaj, another artist, and I said, ‘the first book I can find for threepence, I will work …

Early in the pandemic, those of us raising school-aged children found them suddenly everywhere, all the time, closer than they’d been since infancy. It was as if my oldest child’s dark prophecy had come true: at five, after learning she’d …