Reviews

Reading the wry, surreal tales in Sabrina Orah Mark’s short-story collection Wild Milk often feels like navigating an anxiety nightmare dreamt by a wittier half-sister of the Brothers Grimm. The stories are narrated with a matter-of-factness that could be misconstrued …

Situated midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, about an hour’s drive from the geographical center of California, the inland city of Fresno and the wide expanse of the San Joaquin Valley around it have nurtured a number of influential …

Oculus, Sally Wen Mao’s second collection, travels swiftly and deftly through time and urban landscapes across continents. Unbounded by death and transcending history, these poems interrogate the relationship between technology and the body and confront the symbolic violence of …

“It’s good to know where you come from, so that you do not live as though you’re lost,” Barry Lopez writes about halfway through Horizon, his first full-length work of nonfiction since he cast his careful gaze on the …

Nicole Chung’s debut memoir, All You Can Ever Know, confronts the difficulties Chung encountered growing up as an adopted Korean daughter in a predominantly white southern Oregon town. The book also chronicles her search as an adult for her …

In 2018, Ohio’s state capital hosted a citywide festival commemorating the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars and historians participated in forums on the movement’s impact. Spoken-word and mixed-media artists local to Ohio or from Harlem gave performances, and the Columbus Museum of …

After T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared in 1922, it was hailed as the pre-eminent text of poetic modernism. A pastiche drawn largely from the past, the poem was understood to be making a trenchant comment on the disillusioned …

Kristin George Bagdanov’s debut collection ponders questions of ecology and the body, or what she calls the “world as it uncreates / itself: creature / of its own making.” Ontological quandaries of being, consuming, and having all appear alongside trash …

Long ago, I took a workshop with a moderately well-known American poet. When we met in the student union for the half-hour conference I ’d paid extra for, he was visibly annoyed because he couldn’t smoke. For several minutes he …