Book Reviews
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January 24, 2023 |
Courtesy of oscarhokeah.com Oscar Hokeah’s Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin, 2022) begins with a family tree. Names are stitched together, threading out four generations of a fa...
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January 18, 2023 |
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash Do you get jabbed by a question that seemingly appears ceaseless? Bob Dylan’s song “Watching the River Flow” hints at a matter bound to raise a query. The point i...
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December 12, 2022 |
Photo by Kari Gunter-Seymour / www.karigunterseymourpoet.com “So much here depends” begins a line in a poem from Kari Gunter-Seymour’s new collection, alone in the house...
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December 8, 2022 |
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.—Octavio Paz This quote aptly fits an anthology I came across that goes by the title Converse: Contempora...
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November 14, 2022 |
Through the lens of a notorious murder case, Italian writer Nicola Lagioia paints a grim portrait of the city of Rome and its “desperate” youth and explores the reasons why ordinary people do mon...
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July 12, 2022 |
Photo by Lee Winder / Flickr According to Christian Authier, himself a prizewinning novelist and recently the author of Houellebecq politique (Flammarion, 2022), Michel Houellebecq is...
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June 28, 2022 |
Shadab Zeest Hashmi I first met Shadab Zeest Hashmi at AWP in March 2019, when we both participated in a panel of Pakistani American poets writing in English. On a rainy night, she and her son...
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June 15, 2022 |
Photo by Rhett Wesley / Unsplash Contemporary femininity promises power to those who secure the public gaze by going viral on YouTube. But what does it mean to be visible in this particular wa...
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May 31, 2022 |
Photo by www.Florida-Guidebook.com / Unsplash In memory of José Vázquez Amaral “Movement, I want to show, is something that multilingual writing and translation have in common. Both a...
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April 27, 2022 |
Written by one of Russia’s best-known horror writers, Anna Starobinets, Look at Him (Three String Books, 2020) is an unusual book: it reads partly as a memoir and partly as a journalistic in...
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April 19, 2022 |
Photo by Daniel on Unsplash Readers will naturally and, perhaps, unfortunately, wish to make connections between Sayaka Murata’s (b. 1979) newest novel, Earthlings, translated by Ginn...
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March 15, 2022 |
Photo by Milad Fakurian / Unsplash The largest collection in English of Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s work, Five Books (Bloodaxe, 2021) displays her lifelong project of expressing lib...
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March 9, 2022 |
Photo by Yousef Espanioly on Unsplash Fahredin Shehu writes of Gili Haimovich’s Promised Lands (Finishing Line Press, 2020), “This book communicates globally giving more than a single...
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March 2, 2022 |
Photo by Dominik Scythe / Unsplash A new book by a Nobel laureate and Booker award-winning author always brings with it a sense of trepidation. Will the new novel live up to the already establ...
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February 23, 2022 |
Statue of renowned Kurdish historian, author, and poet Mastoureh Ardalan (1805–1848) in Erbil / Photo by Levi Meir Clancy / Unsplash Even though they appear to have a lot to say about the hist...
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February 22, 2022 |
Photo by Chris Wood / Flickr Houston’s Second Poet Laureate (2015–2017) and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2019, Robin Davidson is the author of three books of poetry: Kn...
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February 1, 2022 |
Antoine-François-Jean Claudet, [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52), daguerreotype, 2019.47, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel / Courtesy of the...
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January 27, 2022 |
Pablo Neruda / Courtesy of the Nobel Foundation In his latest novel, Oh, maligna (Acantilado, 2019), Jorge Edwards (b. 1931, Santiago) pays homage to one of Chile’s most important lit...
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January 12, 2022 |
Leading up to the COP26 conference, in September 2021 several hundred protesters met in London’s Parliament Square before marching to the Home Office / Photo by Alisdare Hickson / Flickr “Our...
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January 11, 2022 |
Giono’s hometown of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in southeastern France / Photo by Phil Richards / Flickr Written late in life, “Le Haut Pays” and “Camargue”—once again paired in the...
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December 21, 2021 |
Gokyo Lakes, Khumjung, Nepal / Photo by Kalle Kortelainen / Unsplash In the aftermath of COP26, it is easy to see we will most likely fail to limit global warming to 1.5℃, or even a catastroph...
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December 15, 2021 |
Photo by Geoff Stahl / Flickr Originally published in 1994, Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, translated by David Shook (Deep Vellum, 2021), takes place in an unnamed c...
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December 13, 2021 |
Photo by Piotr Wójcik, Agencja Gazeta / Courtesy of Culture.pl Zbigniew Mentzel’s Kołakowski: Czytanie świata (Wydawnictwo Znak, 2020) is the first full-length biography of L...
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November 10, 2021 |
Photo by Aideal Hwa / Unsplash If reading Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg’s Robot (Penguin Classics, 2021), translated by Tomasz Mirkowicz, makes you think about Stanislaw Lem’s work, you’re no...
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November 9, 2021 |
Mitchell River National Park, Victoria, Australia / Photo by Zac Porter / Unsplash While the landmark anthology Guwayu – For All Times: A Collection of First Nations Poems (M...