Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare by Lola Haskins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). The word asylum, the title of Lola Haskins’ capacious, questing new book of poems, pivots on a curious and seemingly contradictory double meaning. Merriam-Webster defines an … Read More
Not Dead Yet and Other Stories by Hadley Moore (Autumn House Press, 2019). When my husband and I are back in his hometown, we make a daily visit to New Bethany, the senior living home where his grandmother … Read More
The Arrangements by Kate Colby (Four Way Books, 2018). “Were we born with eyes / or when we saw ourselves // seeing?” Kate Colby asks in “The Beholder,” a poem that appears early in The Arrangements (Four Way … Read More
Let Me Out Here: Stories by Emily W. Pease (Hub City Press, 2019). If the cover image of Emily W. Pease’s new short story collection—a stone-faced little girl staring squarely at the camera, legs planted on a desolate … Read More
House is an Enigma by Emma Bolden (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018). Emma Bolden’s House is an Enigma lives inside a continual unfolding, moving fluidly and fluently between outer surfaces and the meaning-making within, centering on the … Read More
Bad Harvest by Dzvinia Orlowsky (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2018). The title of Dzvinia Orlowsky’s sixth book, Bad Harvest, evokes the Holodomor, the man-made famine that affected and killed millions across the grain-producing Ukraine during Soviet occupation, presumably including … Read More
Outside Is the Ocean by Matthew Lansburgh (University of Iowa Press, 2017). Winner of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Matthew Lansburgh’s first collection possesses the satisfying reach and depth of a novel. The fractured chronology of its … Read More
Come West and See by Maxim Loskutoff (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). It is election season in America again, which affords the country another unsettling visual and numerical representation of just how deeply and irreparably we seem to be … Read More
Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris (Louisiana State University Press, 2018). The title of George Kalogeris’s latest collection of poems is a nod to an ancient travelogue in ten books written by a Greek man named Pausanias in … Read More
Thomas Bernhard: Collected Poems, translated by James Reidel (Seagull Books, 2017). Thomas Bernhard’s prose has an implacable forward motion, driven by repetition and elaboration. A sentence in his final novel, Extinction, is structured in the same way as … Read More
No Small Gift by Jennifer Franklin (Four Way Books, 2018). Jennifer Franklin’s No Small Gift explores ideas of love and punishment, and the way the two can fluctuate and intertwine. That is to say, sometimes love ends in … Read More
Like The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, her collection steeped in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones is preoccupied with the perils and mysteries of the rites of passage a child must make on the way to … Read More