I was Oedipa rebel Oedipa trouble but I I was always my own Oedipa (Oedipa, Act II) Amy McCauley’s approach to Oedipus Rexoffers not just her own take on the classic but also a modernized update to the plot and the work’s form, creating a “poetic play” […]
There’s a lot of talk these days about books as “projects,” so it’s refreshing for me to read a collection that takes more of a mosaic approach. As its title indicates, Heidi Czerwiec’s Fluid States exists in a bricolage mode where the components of these lyric essays rise into each other. […]
Fifteen years after Tupelo Press released his first collection of poetry, Ilya Kaminsky delivers a stunning interplay of poetic structures and voices in Deaf Republic. His latest work is a collective narrative recounting the events that follow the murder by soldiers of a local deaf boy. Told through multiple lenses […]
The chapbook Peninsular Scar, a short, intense collection containing several long poems, documents the imprints of a Florida upbringing. Kaminski, with the perspective that relocation allows, reverses the usual location of the body within landscape. Instead, she locates Florida landscapes and cultures within the body and within a dense, personal […]
I don’t mean to alarm you. Texas is a Death-World . . . . –mónica teresa ortiz How does one continue to live within a “Death-World”? In her second poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, mónica teresa ortiz explores this question in what she […]
The world lives in a garden. Within it is found human intention and vegetative indifference; order and chaos; a portion of space, bounded by mental definition, inside which time unfolds, gathering matter into the forms of leaves and fruits, then breaking them back down into particles. In Emmalea Russo’s G, […]
It has become a tradition that many Chinese write poems in June of each year in memory of the 1989 Student Movement in China. 1989 was the year that Berlin Wall collapsed, followed by tremendous changes in Europe but in China the pro-democracy movement ended in tragedy: hundreds of […]
“Let me tell you about being female” rings, obliquely, the salvo and refrain of Sarah Giragosian’s stunning poem “Missing Person.” In this deft and original work, we are reminded of the modern adage that men are afraid of being embarrassed by women; women are afraid of being killed […]
Kelvin Christopher James is a Trinidadian-American who writes fables, short stories, and novels. Most recently we have received another of his absorbing short stories, “Luck,” and we have taken this time to offer both the tale and an brief e-interview with the author. I began by asking Kelvin how he […]
Mutant, you said, and we understood. Moonlight unlocks murder dreams, the angels sober. In the mystic classroom, we clapped our hands at the seeds of sacred dignity sewn into the skin of western philosophy. Simple. The cells marched. Mother, you re-mother. Bones bloomed and the bodies once inside […]
