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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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] […]

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, […]

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 […]

In May and June 2020, Americans gathered en masse to oppose U.S. law enforcement’s routine murders of Black civilians. Armed with their iPhones, protestors abandoned their tv sets and computer […]