Reviews

Y’all, the strangest thing has happened: suddenly I’m trendy? Or rather, where I’m from is trendy. Appalachia, especially its art and music, is having a moment. The chaos of the […]

Marcel Duchamp coined the term readymade in 1916 and used it to describe prefabricated, mass-produced objects that the artist chooses and isolates from their intended uses, thereby elevating them to the status […]

Lisa Hsiao Chen’s first novel, Activities of Daily Living, is about the importance of maintaining some sort of life practice or “project.” In the midst of the personal loss and […]

When I read Janice Lee’s novel Imagine a Death and Brenda Iijima’s book of poems Bionic Communality, I am awkward. I grope. I fidget. I wonder how to move. I […]

“I do not even understand why people read biography! They should just read the poems to understand Rich.” This impassioned, frustrated interjection by a friend was in response to Hilary […]

SJ Sindu’s Dominant Genes, winner of the 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition, centers on race, class, nationality, sexuality, and gender identity. Sindu’s second chapbook, Dominant Genes defies genres by combining […]

Poets Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner accomplished something daring, provocative, and seemingly preposterous: they lived together openly in a committed lesbian relationship in early-to-mid-twentieth-century England. Of the two, Ackland […]

Reading Wild Spectacle feels something like Janisse Ray inviting me over to dinner to tell me stories all night over a bottle of wine. As its title indicates, this essay […]

I want to elaborate three points about Rosanna Warren’s 2020 volume of poetry, So Forth. First, there is no better painterly contemporary poet, or perhaps no better North American poet, […]

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 […]