Genre: Reviews

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, …

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 century after his execution and nearly as many years after …

Maggie Nelson’s newest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, is an exhaustive survey of the “productive antagonisms” that emerge from contemporary discourse on freedom in an attempt to redefine our understanding of the concept and help …

Ed Roberson’s Asked What Has Changed bears witness to the vertiginous effects of the climate crisis from a prime yet precarious perspective: that of a “black / ecopoet / observ[ing] / the changing / world from / a high-rise / …

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s fifth poetry collection, Aerial Concave without Cloud, is washed in the pale blue light of apocalyptic reckoning. Prophetic and aphotic, this book begins at the microscopic level—photons, nanoseconds, subatomic forces—and ends at the macroscopic scale—fugitive motion, …

I’ve heard Atsuro Riley read publicly only once, at AWP in 2016, as part of the lineup of Whiting Award winners. Before that, I had heard him read a single poem, “Sunder,” for a 2011 Poetry podcast. Riley’s voice, its …