Commentary |
on You Are No Longer In Trouble, poems by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell
“These poems draw on decades of experience with the public school system as it struggles to address — yet often evades — the alienation of American kids, especially the girls.”
Commentary |
on b, Book, and Me, a novel by Kim Sagwa, translated by Sunhee Jeong
“The pummeling to come, Sagwa implies, is what we’re all in for unless the word ‘unless’ stops sounding absurdly impossible.”
Commentary |
on I Will Take The Answer, essays by Ander Monson
“Monson’s goal — to unsettle the idea of personal remembrance as something fully collective, to map a weird and fuzzy spot where his experience is so absurd that’s it’s singular but not so absurd that you can’t relate to it.”
Commentary |
on Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, edited by Lise Funderburg
“These essayists reveal our most ardent yearning for affection alongside its deprivation. But the contributions are also idiosyncratic, and the reader must create one’s own pattern of understanding through the narratives.”
Commentary |
on Where You’re All Going: Four Novellas, by Joan Frank
“Frank makes us work as hard as her characters do to extract some significance out their fleeting and flawed lives. And should the struggle yield any beautiful truths, those, too, must be recognized as provisional.”
Commentary |
on Survival is a Style, poems by Christian Wiman
“Wiman refuses despair — though, like Job, he has many reasons to embrace it. Nor is the hope he chooses naïve; like joy, it’s a hope that affirms the reality of suffering.”
Commentary |
Traversing Towards the Void: on The Galleons, poems by Rick Barot
“For a poet who has written lyric poems with the precision of a needle and thread, this new book feels broader, looser in syntax. We’re still lucky enough, though, to experience his laser-focused eye …”
Commentary |
on Recent Books On Music
Queering Pop Music, Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, & the Life and Music of Johnny Hodges
Commentary |
on Cleanness, a novel by Garth Greenwell
“This is a novel in which every character carries with them a sense of mystery and is fundamentally unknowable. And while the narrator’s mind is decidedly open to those who read his tale, these gaps suggest that there are things that even the reader may not know about him.”
Commentary |
on Everywhere You Don’t Belong, a novel by Gabriel Bump
“Gabriel Bump’s debut novel captures the verve of the South Side while tangling with issues of identity and injustice in — and hope for — the black community in America.”
Commentary |
on Lux, a novel by Elizabeth Cook
“Lux reshapes the story of David and Bathsheba into a moving meditation on human failings and acts of atonement, informed by the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition without being subject to it.”
Commentary |
on Here, poems by Sydney Lea
“Lea transforms memories into evocative frissons of lived moments, life-changing encounters, coruscating scenes, and indelible losses.”
Commentary |
on Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K. Chong
“Many interviewees said they weren’t sure they ‘counted’ as a critic because they don’t self-identify as one. They often write less out of a sense of journalistic public service and more to reinforce their professional standing elsewhere.”
Commentary |
on The Third Rainbow Girl, nonfiction by Emma Copley Eisenberg
“The entwined threads of silence, storytelling, and truth — and the messy concept of justice — are far more critical to this narrative than the murders themselves. Justice is a thing that exists within cultural norms. And those norms are often very toxic.”
Commentary |
on Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, stories by Jonathan Tel
“The scarcity of homegrown writers allowed to portray China’s market-driven culture and suffocating state control makes Tel’s stories fundamental at this moment.”