Blog / Reviews

Intersectional Voices for a New Generation: How A New Young Adult Anthology in Verse Continues a Conversation Started Decades Ago

March 26, 2021 - By Shanta Lee Gander

"The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to ‘see’, what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body—that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being—this is the revolutionary promise of 'theory in the flesh…' (xxiv)"—Cherríe Moraga, co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back

You Don't Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves Edited by Diana Whitney (Workman, 2021)

I was three years old when the voices of women of color came together and created living history with the anthology, This...

Happy Times Indeed

March 13, 2021 - By Jim Hicks

On this day, March 11th (which I predict by this time next year will be recognized as an International Day of Remembrance and Mourning), I’ve decided to write something entirely inappropriate, because frankly, it’s just what the doctor ordered. Those of us still lucky enough to be in the world have realized that much has changed over the last year—and that much more must be changed. Due to the global pandemic, current estimates are that we’ve lost 2.6 million souls in a single year, with over a half million here in the US alone. At some point, no doubt, statisticians will calculate the excess deaths of this year compared to years past, and we’ll likely find that the toll has been much greater than we currently believe.

Faced with this grim reality,...

Elegies, Activism, and Aubades

February 20, 2021 - By Maria Nazos

A Review of Martín Espada, Floaters (Norton, 2021).
 

From the moment you open your copy of Martín Espada’s Floaters, you hear echoes of Whitman—and Espada’s own unmistakable, bold voice.

Responding to our past presidential administration, this collection tackles the hot-button themes. In addition to being a voice for the voiceless, with booming, resonant, sinewy lines, Floaters takes on other difficult topics as well. From immigration and racism to love and death, the reader is swept from the wreckage from the Trump years into the speaker’s love poems and elegies.

Along the way, Espada’s lines respond to the callous...

Under the Dome

February 5, 2021 - By Michael Thurston

Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (City Lights, 2020)

On or around the 20th of April, 1970, Paul Celan walked from his apartment on Avenue Emile-Zola to the Pont Mirabeau and stepped from the bridge into the Seine, from which he did not emerge alive. Celan’s suicide resonated throughout the European literary world: yet another among the seemingly countless casualties of the Holocaust, of the Nazi labor camps and death camps, after Celan had been imprisoned in the former and his parents murdered in the latter. For the French poet, Jean Daive, Celan’s disappearance continues, like the...

Celebration

January 5, 2021 - By Jim Hicks

The Regal Lemon Tree by Juan José Saer (Open Letter, 2020)

Though I’m less than certain about the world, and definitely not optimistic at all about this country, as far as I’m concerned the New Year couldn’t have started better. I spent it at a family celebration: three brothers-in-law, two of their wives and all the kids, the girls back from the big city, a friend in tow as well, roasting a lamb, sitting together outside around a big table, reminiscing about old times and imagining the future, drinking lots of red wine—eventually some local musicians showed up, and then the dancing began. It doesn’t get any better.

Okay, yeah...