Reviews

At the end of his inimitable 1909 biography of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois poses some troubling questions about the enduring significance of the great abolitionist half a century after his execution and nearly as many years after …

Maggie Nelson’s newest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, is an exhaustive survey of the “productive antagonisms” that emerge from contemporary discourse on freedom in an attempt to redefine our understanding of the concept and help …

Ed Roberson’s Asked What Has Changed bears witness to the vertiginous effects of the climate crisis from a prime yet precarious perspective: that of a “black / ecopoet / observ[ing] / the changing / world from / a high-rise / …

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s fifth poetry collection, Aerial Concave without Cloud, is washed in the pale blue light of apocalyptic reckoning. Prophetic and aphotic, this book begins at the microscopic level—photons, nanoseconds, subatomic forces—and ends at the macroscopic scale—fugitive motion, …

I’ve heard Atsuro Riley read publicly only once, at AWP in 2016, as part of the lineup of Whiting Award winners. Before that, I had heard him read a single poem, “Sunder,” for a 2011 Poetry podcast. Riley’s voice, its …

In May and June 2020, Americans gathered en masse to oppose U.S. law enforcement’s routine murders of Black civilians. Armed with their iPhones, protestors abandoned their tv sets and computer screens—in front of which many had been parked for months …

If the apple is that most iconic of American fruits, what is its counterpart among diasporic cultures from Asia? When I was growing up in Baguio City in the Philippines, one could buy tissue-wrapped “Red Delicious” apples and “Sunkist” oranges …

Every piece included in Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, a new anthology edited by Anjanette Delgado, grapples with the concept of “uprootedness,” a term used by Reinaldo Arenas, an influential Cuban novelist and gay …

God tastes like a walnut. Jesus tastes like fried chicken. Dolly Parton tastes like Sweet’N Low, and matricide—for any correlation or the lack thereof—tastes like peach cobbler. Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2011), is a coming-of-age story …