Reviews

“Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent,” writes the Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova in In Memory of Memory, originally published in 2017 and presented by New Directions in a caring and delicate translation by the poet Sasha Dugdale. Survivors, all […]

How does one survive in the current climate, political and ecological? “Live in the world and hurt / the living lining, that’s how,” Catherine Wagner proposes in her recent book Of Course. Wagner stages interrogations of the self both playful and violent to reimagine nature writing and to inspire a sly revolution in the pastoral […]

When every screen in the world goes vvvzzztt and then blank, “What happens to people who live inside their phones?” Such is the question the world’s resident doyen of hysterical realism and American mythology, Don DeLillo, poses and answers in his most recent book, The Silence. Both brevity and absurdity provoke numerous reflexive questions when […]

“I came along a silk route,” Aditi Machado announces in the first line of the first poem in her new book, Emporium. The statement contains a careful imprecision: Machado substitutes the expected “road” for a near, but disorienting synonym, “route.” And the speaker is mobile, in motion; the poem refuses to situate itself in a […]

“Daddy, what’s Mississippi like?” In the prologue to his 2003 memoir Ever Is a Long Time, author W. Ralph Eubanks recounts this innocent, yet surprisingly complicated question posed to him by his young son one night during a bedtime conversation. The answer he gave told the story of a pastoral life, full of happy memories […]

If the lyrical mode of the poems in Henri Cole’s Blizzard is something “elegant, libidinous, austere”—as one poem characterizes Cole’s own personality—the great subject to which Cole returns is desire itself, the desire that directs our actions and libidos, that guides all of life, separating those who act and are actionable, the truly alive, from […]

Habitat Threshold, the new collection of poetry by Craig Santos Perez, opens with his daughter’s birth. Surprisingly, however, this family milestone is decentered by another presence: The doctor presses the plastic probe against my pregnant wife’s belly. Plastic leaches estrogenic and toxic chemicals. Ultrasound waves pulse between plastic, tissue, fluid, and bone until the embryo […]

In February 2020, the same month Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning was released, I attended a teach-in organized by Tsuru for Solidarity in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tsuru for Solidarity is a national project led by Japanese Americans working to end detention sites, supporting front-line immigrant and refugee communities, and challenging racist, inhumane […]

The universe, in its expansions and contractions, seems wholly contained in The Glass Constellation, Arthur Sze’s eleventh collection of poetry, which gathers, along with his newest poems, the entirety of his previous ten books. Yet Sze’s poetry, as a poetry of paradox, is the opposite of containment—it is, as the universe is, an ever-expanding web. […]

In The End of October, published early in the present pandemic, Lawrence Wright initially appeared to be not only a novelist, but also a prophet. Before the virus now known as COVID-19 made a crucial mutation, while it still predated primarily on bats, pangolins, and other wild animals in the south of China, Wright envisioned […]