Multispecies Kin
Lucien Darjeun Meadows reviews dg nanouk okpik’s Blood Snow
All posts filed under: Book Reviews
Longform reviews of poetry books.
The Infinite Potential of Wrong Directions
Asa Drake reviews Xiao Yue Shan’s then telling be the antidote
All of Us Come with a Ballad
Han VanderHart reviews Diane Seuss
From Witness From Speech From Image: On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Summer Farah | Critic at Large This essay is also available as a print zine through Open Books. All proceeds will be sent to Gaza Poets Society. The Arab Apocalypseby Etel AdnanLitmus Press, 2007 First Published by Post-Apollo Press, 1989 Dicteeby Theresa Hak Kyung ChaUniversity of California Press, 2022First Published by Tanam Press, 1982 In a Western Art History course, I learned to read images—to follow the eye, from the top left corner to the bottom right as if I was reading a page of words in English, but to let the artists’ lines guide and redirect my focus. To understand what the image is doing by identifying these moments of departure. I also learned art history as a comparative practice: to speak of an era is to put a collection of paintings next to each other and make conclusions about the time, to consider the world that presses into the frame. Before I am an editor, poet, critic, or any kind of writer, I am a reader; I want to follow the feeling. Reading …
Dreaming the Living and the Dead: On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa
“Dreams, like letters or memories or photographs, can resurrect the dead, and the dead arrive throughout this book.”
Friends, or All That Is Knowable
“As these odes accrue, they flesh out a life lived in company, which is quite the opposite of the solitary character of the Mary Ruefle I’ve long held in my mind.” —Tyler Barton
I Unthread and He Arranges Me
Looking, we are reminded again and again, is, too, about being looked at, about where, in the act of looking, agency and power begin and how that changes depending on who is doing the looking.
Strange and Funny Doors of Deep Feeling: Michael Earl Craig’s Iggy Horse
Horses, capable of deep knowing, stride alongside animate eyeglasses, mysterious flecks of trash, and coy, almost-ever-present lawnmowers.
I Am Finished With History
“The hallowed argument goes: The artist has vanished but the art lives. Franklin adds: Art lives and so does the materials that made the art. They mark us as much as we’ve manipulated them.” -Esther Lin
So You Are Here, and There Still
“Throughout Metzger’s poems, we experience an artist patching together experiences– present and past–, sometimes creating tectonic friction between them, in order to dwell on the meaning of life.” -David Roderick