Reviews

In the Lateness of World, Carolyn Forché’s first poetry volume to appear in almost two decades, derives its title from line fourteen of Robert Duncan’s “Poetry, a Natural Thing.” Denise Levertov, some of whose finest poems vigorously protested U.S. intervention …

How to imagine the intellectual and affective thicket of literary inheritance is one of the urgent densities of aesthetic life. This exploration of lineages and canonicity is also one of writing’s most complex pleasures. However, the joy of reading and …

When podcaster Hillary Frank, host and founder of The Longest Shortest Time, first started pitching her motherhood-centered show for radio, she “met rejection after rejection.” Editors pushed back on the grounds of market demand, as Frank recalls in a …

Of the many monsters that walk the landscape of Kenji C. Liu’s second poetry collection, Monsters I Have Been, perhaps the most terrifying are those that have blended into everyday life. Godzilla and Ultraman are featured prominently in the …

The novel Where Reasons End was written, as many people know by now, in the year after the suicide of the author’s sixteen-year-old son, Vincent Kean Li. Noting tonal and stylistic departures from her previous works, reviewers have praised it …

All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer is a collection of essays by Karen Babine about feeding her family while her mother dies of cancer. The book covers the dark winter months in Minnesota, from the moment …

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 …