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MASSACHUSETTS REVIEWS: The Poetics of Refraction in House A By Jennifer S. Cheng

December 1, 2016 - By Floyd Cheung

House A. By Jennifer S. Cheng
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2016)

Longing for home recurs as a theme in Asian American literature. Works by both immigrant and US-born writers, especially older ones, often focus on links to a distant Asian homeland or the desire to feel at home in America. Separation from an Asian homeland can follow from voluntary immigration or forced migration, opportunity or war, among other forces. Once in the United States, Asian Americans can feel at a loss on account of blatant racism as well as subtler notions of cultural citizenship. Who among us—first generation or fifth—hasn’t heard the imperative to “go back...

Massachusetts Reviews: Fire the Bastards!

September 22, 2016 - By Gary Amdahl

Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!  (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) was first published by the author, in the author’s magazine newspaper (no caps, and the italics are mine), in 1962.  The text was written on a typewriter (again, no caps, very little in the way of punctuation, extra spaces between sentences) mimeographed, and stapled.  It’s hard to imagine that such a homely production had any currency at all, but it did, with Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson attesting on the back of the DAP edition to its widespread availability in Greenwich Village, in...

Massachusetts Reviews: The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues

September 14, 2016 - By Jeff Diteman

The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues (Drunken Boat Media, 2015),

While the conventional approach to poetic production is additive, involving the careful placement of words on the void of the blank page, erasure poetry is subtractive, starting with an existing text and deleting material until only a poem remains. The source texts for such a procedure can be anything--another poem, an ancient codex, a corporate annual report, a scientific study, a newspaper article--any document that the poet thinks can be...

Massachusetts Reviews: Aliceheimer’s

September 6, 2016 - By Emily Wojcik

Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath (Penn State University Press, 2016)

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.” —Alice in Wonderland

Alzheimer’s disease looms large in the American imagination. The stories and movies follow familiar plots: Parent (or spouse) begins to lose things, forgets names, perhaps leaves the house lived in for decades and gets lost. Child (or spouse) watches helplessly until the moment when a...

Why You Need to Read _Fire and Forget_

January 5, 2014 - By Jim Hicks

Let me be more specific: by “you,” I mean us. US civilians. Fire and Forget’s “short stories from the long war” are each written by an American with intimate experience of our most recent military campaigns, and you need to read them. And, yes, “campaign” is the right word.

1) Because you don’t speak their language yet, but you’re going to. The vets are coming home again; Joe and Jane have to find each other somehow. From its opening story—Jacob Siegel’s “Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere”—the single most pervasive theme...