Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument reviewed by Jacqueline Balderrama — Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument reviewed by Jacqueline Balderrama— In Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press, 2020), Susan Briante highlights monuments in numerous forms. . . . read more
Soham Patel’s ever really hear it reviewed by Lisa Flum — Soham Patel’s ever really hear it, winner of the 2017 Subito Prize, takes an innovative approach to lyric poetry’s origins: the creative entanglement of poetry and music . . . read more
Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers reviwed by Weston Morrow — Jake Skeets’s collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019) is rife with natural imagery and its relation to the human . . . read more
Susan Devan Harness’s Bitterroot reviewed by Phillip Barcio — For generations, Americans have proudly embraced the notion of the United States as a melting pot—a utopian republic where members of every culture on Earth live in harmony . . . read more
Abbey Mei Otis’s Alien Virus Love Disaster reviewed by Jason Resnikoff — When the world ends, things will be pretty much as they are now, only worse. After the aliens arrive and when robots walk among us, when people live on the moon and truckers shuttle . . . read more
Heid E. Erdrich’s New Poets of Native Nations reviewed by William Cordeiro — Heid E. Erdrich has edited a superb and overdue anthology showcasing the diversity of new Native American poetry, though she claims upfront that so-called . . . read more
Grant Maierhofer’s Peripatet reviewed by Mike Corrao — Grant Maierhofer’s Peripatet (Inside the Castle, 2019) is an explorative work. At its core, the book is non-fiction, with passages flowing between autobiographical examinations, aesthetic analyses, and . . . read more
Jen Bervin’s Silk Poemsreviewed by Sarah Thompson — Silk Poems manifests an ethos of continuity and presence as it places temporalities, modalities, discourses, and disciplines in communion. It enacts a sense of history predicated on intimacy . . . read more
Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings reviewed by Jason Myers — “When I speak,” Aditi Machado declares in the first lines of “Prospekt,” “the fascist in me speaks.” Such boldness is characteristic of Machado’s first collection, Some Beheadings . . . read more
Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine, reviewed by Michelle Macfarlane — Is it the eye that sees? Or the mind? In Sheep Machine, Vi Khi Nao’s painstaking process of viewing video footage invites the reader to participate in a mental image-making born of . . . read more
George Choundas’s The Making Sense of Things, Reviewed by Katharine Coldiron — George Choundas’s debut collection is oddly shaped. The stories are either quite short (a page, five pages, perhaps nine) or quite long (twenty-eight pages . . . read more
Henry Hoke’s Genevieves, Reviewed by Joe Sacksteder — “Weaponize your juvenilia,” recommends the narrator of “Wentz,” the opening story of Henry Hoke’s collection, Genevieves. Who is speaking and to whom is unclear. The story’s protagonist, a girl . . . read more
Brian Evenson’s Reports, Reviewed by Alyssa Greene — The word report evokes a kind of officialese, bureaucracy and formality—a document that purports to be factual but, through its linguistic stiffness and the constraints of its genre, perhaps . . . read more
Adam Giannelli’s Tremulous Hinge, Reviewed by Chelsea Dingman — What can language accomplish, in and of itself? In Tremulous Hinge, Adam Giannelli’s award-winning debut poetry collection from the University of Iowa Press, language . . . read more
Philip Schaefer’s Bad Summon, Reviewed by Kristine Sloan — Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” serves as the annunciatory spark for emerging poet Philip Schaefer’s debut poetry collection Bad Summon. Hugo’s voice calls to us through the years . . . read more
Hisham Bustani’s The Perception of Meaning, Reviewed by Matthew Nye — In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh characterizes one effect of climate change as having rendered the once improbable into concrete urgent reality . . . read more
Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, reviewed by Phillip Barcio — Amateur is the true story of a transgender man who enters a charity boxing match as part of his journey to discover the nature of masculinity. Over the course of his training, . . . read more