Category: Book Reviews

That I Should Stop Searching for Whoever I Was Before: ‘True Mistakes’ by Lena Moses-Schmitt

by

Posted on by editor

The poems of Lena Moses-Schmitt’s new collection, True Mistakes (96 pages; University of Arkansas Press), feature those gaps of perception in which what is obvious or straightforward becomes supplanted by the relentless onslaught of experience. A finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the collection traces that which we so often miss or move past in a hurry, and grounds us in a new mode of witness—where, “Like the sun, I can only look at you/when I don’t look.” Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living. In its […]

Continue Reading

To Ride Is to Fall, To Live Is to Fall: ‘Riding’ by Pardis Mahdavi

by

Posted on by editor

In 2000, U.S. author Pardis Mahdavi arrives in Tehran, determined to learn about a country she has only heard secondhand and sometimes sensational accounts of—tales of revolution and of the country as it existed during her parents’ emigration. Her scholarly interest in sexual politics and the emerging feminist movement in Iran leads her to cross paths with young women in the country’s underground who are leading a self-described “sexual revolution” in their open exploration of their bodies and intimate desires—a rebellion against the morally coded impositions and restrictions of a regime that has been in power since the Islamic Revolution […]

Continue Reading

The Architecture of Memory: ‘Poet in the Neighborhood: Selected Poems of Rafael Alcides’

by

Posted on by editor

A momentous collection of poems about struggle and resistance, Rafael Alcides’s Poet in the Neighborhood (190 pages; Asterism), translated and selected by Pablo Medina, traces the solitude of voluntary internal exile by a Cuban poet who traverses his mother’s tragedies, bawdy humor, and prayerful conversation. (A few of the poems in the collection were published in ZYZZYVA Issue 127.) No stranger to myth, Alcides likens his mother to “a girl filled with illusion,” “laden with memories like Sinbad”, comparing her to La Gioconda and a Shakespearean tragedy as he mythologizes her history as a young woman in Havana. His own […]

Continue Reading

The Sorrow and the Fury: ‘Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece’ by Nasser Rabah

by

Posted on by editor

“And I’m delirious: Gaza… Gaza,” Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah writes, the echo of grief shadowing the speaker’s cries. Written as he endured the genocidal assault, Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (192 pages; City Lights Books) resounds with gripping humanity, as his poems of love, the dead, and an accompanying fierce valuation of life evoke realities that often evade propaganda and the mass media. Rabah’s first collection in translation is a bilingual edition translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli, and offers a powerful introduction to his lyrical work in English. The poet’s language is marked by […]

Continue Reading

At the Edge and Then Past It: ‘Audition’ by Pip Adam

by

Posted on by editor

Pip Adam’s boundless and mythic new novel, Audition (Coffee House Press; 217 pages), begins with three giants trapped on a spaceship, exiled from Earth. As they hurtle through space, Alba, Stanley, and Drew speak to each other; if they stop talking, their bodies will resume growing larger and, eventually, break open the ship. This opening section, consisting entirely of dialogue, is disoriented and disorienting. The trio struggles to describe their situation. “Are you getting bigger?” they ask each other. “Were we quiet and time has passed?” They can recall being in a classroom before being put on the spaceship Audition, […]

Continue Reading

Wall of Glass: Q&A with Matthew Specktor

by

Posted on by editor

Since the 1970s, when blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars began earning astronomical sums at the box office, the future prospects of the movies have been murky. More recently, accelerated by the global COVID lockdown that began in March 2020, the communal experience of movie-viewing in cineplexes has severely declined. Add to this the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Max, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a future when seeing a new film in your local cinema will be considered as quaint as bowling in an alley with hand-set pins. In novelist and cultural critic Matthew […]

Continue Reading

The Mystery of the Caves: ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya

by

Posted on by editor

What happened on Friday night? There was a high-school football game, of course; it is America, and our beautiful boys played like young gods! Then they gathered themselves, the quarterback and two running backs, and they went for Indian food, and then to a party with about a hundred other kids, a party within the ruins of a house set off the road and near three caves.  Another story is in the making, an older story, an older question: What happened in the cave?  How did Stanley Kincaid, a troublemaker par excellence, get beat to a pulp and skewered hundreds […]

Continue Reading

Living to Just Work: ‘Make Your Own Job’ by Erik Baker

by

Posted on by editor

You’re tired. Perhaps you’re on your feet all day, or sit in a car for most of the night. Maybe you wake up to unread emails. You polish that resume, prep that interview, hold out hope. You clock in, you invoice, you bill the hour. You cannot shake that sinking feeling that you are not quite where you need to be. That your time, already limited, is misspent. That you could be, should be, doing more. You are not alone. Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (337 pages; Harvard University Press) arrives amid […]

Continue Reading

The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr

by

Posted on by editor

I live a quiet life. Wife, family, gym membership—the whole catastrophe. But Joshua Mohr’s latest, Saint the Terrifying (290 pages; The Unnamed Press) offers me—and you, Dear Reader—a day-pass to a world of pain, glory, lust, and limitlessness. It’s a picaresque account of a West Oakland punk rocker on a mission from God (make that Scandinavian deities) to find out who’s been stealing the gear from his starving musician buddies and make them pay for their sins, bigly. At story’s outset, the one-eyed title character is recovering from the death of his alcoholic mother, who had a habit of dancing […]

Continue Reading

‘Bad’ Women: ‘Shame on You’ by Melissa Petro

by

Posted on by editor

“Brown,” as in Brené Brown, is mentioned forty-two times in Melissa Petro’s investigative memoir, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (288 pages; Putnam). It’s not surprising. Few people are as connected with studying shame as Brown, whose 2011 TED talk “The power of vulnerability” and subsequent books catalyzed an anti-shame movement. Yet shame, as Petro states, “remains no less pervasive today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago.”  Seven out of ten teenage girls are ashamed of their bodies; seventy-five percent of executive women feel imposter syndrome; three out of […]

Continue Reading

In the Time of COVID: ‘A Journal of the Plague Years: Words and Music from the Lost Days’

by

Posted on by editor

Capturing the “decisive moment,’’ in Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, has always been a perilous project, made more so in these dizzying times of social media, constant disinformation, and attention spans as fleeting as the latest app or iPhone upgrade. All the more impressive then, when writers, and editors, take the time for a more considered look at once-shattering events that have been too quickly forgotten. Such is the case with A Journal of the Plague Years: Words & Music from the Lost Days (289 pages; Blue Books). A spinoff from an online website offering takes on the immediate and long-term impact of […]

Continue Reading

What Was Lost Still Remains: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

by

Posted on by editor

How is a goddess erased from history? What can be done to reinstate her? In her stunning new novel, Elif Shafak ponders these questions in reference to Nisaba, the ancient Sumerian goddess of writing. There Are Rivers in the Sky (464 pages; Knopf) is profound and multi-layered, braiding three distinct stories that eventually merge to form the narrative, like tributaries forming a single river. The tale begins with a single raindrop that falls from the sky onto the beard of King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, who assembled an impressive library that included a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh etched onto […]

Continue Reading