The stories of Meghan Kenny’s debut collection Love Is No Small Thing follow a diverse range of narrators driven by a shared longing for intimacy. Characters struggle to navigate through the ever-complicated terrain of romantic and familial relationships. In … Read More
In Ishion Hutchinson’s second collection, House of Lords and Commons, we hear the voices of Port Antonio, Jamaica, with its disparity of race and wealth, remembered and re-envisioned by the poet. The book opens, in the poem “Station,” with … Read More
Most of the poems in Gabriella Klein’s wise and beautifully strange debut collection, Land Sparing, are spoken—as so many contemporary lyric poems are—from the point of view of a first-person speaker, an “I.” But what a capacious and compassionate … Read More
To a Catholic schoolchild—baptized, confirmed, slouch-shouldered at weekly masses and fully imbued with the weight of Catholic guilt—perhaps no threat is as solemnly terrifying as that of excommunication. To be cast out from a community that so thoroughly defines … Read More
Sharon Dolin’s latest collection of poems, Manual for Living, is ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ written in a state of perplexity. Com-prised of three ekphrastic sections, Manual for Living presents three different sets of self-advice which the reader, along … Read More
Everything Broken Up Dances, James Byrne’s third collection of poetry (and the first one published by an American press), opens with the author’s birth, a dislocation magnified by the sudden influx of pop culture: “Star Wars premiered as they … Read More
One Hundred Hungers, Lauren Camp’s third book of poems, won the 2015 Dorset Prize, selected by David Wojahn. In this lush collection, Camp evokes her father’s family history in Baghdad and her relationship to Jewish-Arabic culture, particularly its language … Read More
Radioland, by Lesley Wheeler, and Stay, by Kathleen McGookey, are new books by two poets who appeared together in the spring 2014 issue of Salamander. Their collections, as in the individual publications, explore the breakdown of one’s parents’ relationship … Read More
Fani Papageorgiou’s newest collection of poems, Not So Ill with You and Me, is composed of four long, fragmentary poems. The book takes its title from the last sentence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, a … Read More
Sara Majka’s stories are imbued with longing for lost loved ones and lost homes in places where the narrator, Anne, has lived. But the stories are also about places she has not experienced and people who slip away before … Read More
Following the thirty-six years of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorial rule of Spain, the country began its swift transition to a democracy in 1975. The surrender of power was quick and relatively drama-free, considering that this very political party had long … Read More
Grammar is not only a map to a new language, but a map into a new world. In the United States, where on the one hand, certain biblical verses are quoted for political ends large and small, but on … Read More