Reviews

Kaveh Akbar’s debut poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is about the essential consequences of incarnation, is a sensory catalog of wounds and wonders, vices and pleasures. His poems—fragmented, […]

Poets have been lamenting the recalcitrance of language at least since Byron’s Childe Harold complained in the early nineteenth century that he had not found “words which are things.” Approaching […]

What gives a poem with political content its force? How does a poet use lyrical tools—in a book-length narrative—to critique powerful institutions when those very institutions seem too large and […]

When the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up onto the shore of Bodrum, Turkey, in September 2015, the photograph of him went viral, sending a shockwave through a part […]

Almost by accident, not long ago I found myself living and teaching in the Baltic seaport town of Klaipeda, Lithuania, for several months. A few wealthy Mennonites from North America […]

Whereas speaking itself is defiance. —Layli Long Soldier I. In the discourse of law the term whereas signals a recitation of the important context in a formal or contractual document—but […]

According to the American Academy of Microbiology, the human body contains about three times more bacterial cells than human cells—to say nothing of viruses, fungi, or other protozoa. These invisible […]

In The Writing of the Disaster (1986), Maurice Blanchot argues that narrating disaster—global, national, local, or personal—is an impossible task because it cannot be articulated or explained. Writing about disaster, […]

Steven Dunn’s novel Potted Meat begins with an unconventional table of contents under the guise of an ingredients list and instructions for consumption. This maneuver automatically subverts readers’ expectations of […]

The text message that begins Tommy Pico’s 98-page-long poem is addressed to potential lover “Girard,” but I like to think of it as an invitation to the reader as well: […]