Commentary |
on Lima :: Limón, poems by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
“With an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region.”
Commentary |
on Three Women, nonfiction by Lisa Taddeo
“Part of what makes Three Women so entrancing are the unruly implications of these women’s disparate stories.”
Commentary |
on The Complaints, poems by W. S. Di Piero
“His poems are marked by a gentle, almost-childlike need to be reassured that, amidst the flux and confusion of being in time, someone — some absent ‘you’ — is listening.”
Commentary |
on White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row
“White Flights might best be described as a lament: Here we have a country with a rich ethnic and racial background, and our most acclaimed white writers seem to be strenuously laboring to avoid it.”
Fiction |
“The New Priest”
“We had also never heard of a priest having a husband. It is a very new thing for our Church. We are still getting used to it, frankly. We need some time. But we didn’t get any time, because the Search Committee and the Vestry went and foisted this fellow on us.”
Commentary |
on Stay and Fight, a novel by Madeline Ffitch
“Stay and Fight isn’t an activist novel in which the heroic environmentalists beat back the encroaching developers. The landscape is too complicated for that now. But Ffitch also envisions a more compassionate world where people can improve the institutions that are holding fast to an environment-wrecking sensibility.”
Commentary |
on Beirut Hellfire Society, a novel by Rawi Hage
“As the novel opens, a son is inducted by his father into the Hellfire Society, a clandestine group that arranges the disposition of dead people who have been denied conventional burial.”
Commentary |
on Beyond Babylon, a novel by Igiaba Scego, translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson
“… a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.”
Poetry |
“Mafia Myth” and “Midlife Aubade”
Fiction |
from My Mother’s Tears
“… she delivered this sentence that, true or false, desolates, rots the soul: You must always, at every moment, distrust everyone around you … Even your father … And even your mother …”
Commentary |
on Against Translation by Alan Shapiro
“His fidelity to feelings and insights that cannot be reconciled with each other, his paradoxical equanimity that allows for anger and forgiving anguish, have grown more extensive …”
Fiction |
from Études de silhouettes, micro-fictions by Pierre Senges
“… by the momentum of this detachment, I am able to remove the me who occupies these lines and is composing them, and who still ardently longs to exist on paper …”
Commentary |
on Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Matthew Amos & Fredrik Rönnbäck
“The migrant is neither an exception nor a discontinuity but rather the harbinger and incarnation of globality”
Commentary |
on Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 by Lee Ann Roripaugh & Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe
“The discursive personae in these visionary narratives allow the poets to grapple with the enormity of human tragedy and folly.”
Fiction |
“The Other Side of the Dock”
“Looking at the sea too long made me nauseated, thinking inevitably of biology classes, of the teacher’s amphibious hands, explaining the cycle of life and of all those fish reproducing themselves so close to me, in a lukewarm salty broth.”