Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s magnificently charming and layered prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat, has had such broad critical and public appeal that it is easy to forget it is […]
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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 […]
Read MoreMarcel 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 […]
Read MoreLisa 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 […]
Read MoreWhen 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 […]
Read More“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 […]
Read MoreThere is one poem Joshua Nguyen was unable to include in his debut poetry collection, despite his best efforts: an extended cento—a form he invented—consisting of found text alternated with […]
Read MoreSJ 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 […]
Read MorePoets 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 […]
Read MoreReading 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 […]
Read MoreI 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, […]
Read MoreAt 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 […]
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