Genre: 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 2020s has left Americans collectively bereft, uneasy, hungry for authenticity. …

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 of art. What Ander Monson blurbs of CORRECTION…

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 signs of quietus that punctuate everyday life, our projects …

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 must grow new limbs, new tails. I find myself …

“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 Holladay’s The Power of Adrienne Rich. The days and …

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 elements of essay and poetry and impressing upon its …

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 was the most visibly gender nonconforming: dressed in trousers, shirt, …

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 collection contains descriptions of the spectacles of nature: birds, marine …

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 transferring a painterly sensibility into language. After all, …