Exploring the societal institutions that are founded on and perpetuate racism, white supremacy, and colonization, Lea’s book details her journey in moving beyond the racism ingrained in her family’s lineage and environment. Ultimately, American Bloodlines is about human connection and how kinship is our weapon against hate.
Read MoreRosenfeld compares the narrator’s hearing difficulties to the silences engulfing people whose stories are lost to time… The narrator seeks to restore them, countering our current difficulty hearing or heeding the past.
Read MoreMother Memory is an art exhibit that will open at Wonzimer (Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights) on August 15, 2025. A related poetry-and-performance event will take place on August 22. The exhibit will include a selection of work from nine artists. The event will showcase the work of seven poets and three performers.
Read MoreIt’s always been my belief that writing is a political act, an act of resistance, however we decide to use our words to do so. Our writing should absolutely reflect society and our environments as an act of resistance.
Read MoreDaley's book is a reaching for clarity, a refining of vision to include those energetic threads that lie under the surface, perhaps unexamined, and to see those threads clearly for how they affect our understanding of this world and our place in it.
Read MoreLives happen in shards, small and finite dramas, only slowly building up to a larger narrative. I didn't want to impose the narrative of a realistic novel on this life — that felt false.
Read MoreTraditional poetry is meant to be interpreted and analyzed; this book, however, fights back.
Read MoreBrilliant Exiles is a reminder of the societal conditions that force artistic exodus and the incredible gifts that artists bring us when they are welcome at home.
Read MoreConsistently funny, violent, and perverse, Diane Cook’s writing skinny-dips between nihilism, and hope.
Read MoreWith my artwork (though it often incorporates text), I access areas where language doesn’t exist. Only action, reaction, flow, and observation do. When I am “in a zone,” I am not thinking consciously. If my mind intervenes and language enters the equation, I find the resulting work stale or ordinary, while my quest is to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Read MoreThe opening poem in Swan’s Dandelion lets us join a person (we assume it is the author) in a canoe with a friend. The two lament the death of the friend’s son. Geese are flying so low their bodies are mirrored in the lake. One senses the violence of the movement as one also experiences the cutting expanse of grief that seems to spread across the lake. The poem forecasts a sober collection, despite the book’s bucolic title.
Read MoreDutton is out to give us the American prairie, or what remains of it; climate catastrophe is never far in these pages, the first piece in the collection being set during the hottest week in recorded history
Read MoreA more conventional film would have stayed grounded in straight psychological realism, taking the viewer into Maddy and Owen’s world... But worlds are permeable in I Saw the TV Glow...
Read MoreIf we are operating... in an absence of institutional and societal truth and reconciliation.... then all we have to sit with in the end is art, no matter what form it takes.
Read MoreThroughout the book, Nicorvo offers multiple takes on the title’s meaning: It is, most literally, what is stamped on the copy he receives of the crime report of his mother’s rape. But it is also a way to talk about the nature of memoir-writing, how one has no choice but to accept that “a story, any story, even a true story, can only ever be a copy.”
Read MoreThis poem is an excellent example of the way language can hover over singular moments of our lives and recall the unique intensity, the intimacy and wonder, that made our humanity meaningful…
Read MoreOrigin Story is wonderfully complex and explosive, and while it resists a fairytale ending, it offers something better than closure. It offers hope and a glimpse of how things ought to be.
Read MoreMajor Jackson's collected poems represent a much-anticipated achievement for the poet and to the faithful followers of his poetry, lectures, and his new podcast. For readers new to his work, this volume offers an opportunity to become familiar with the poet's finest.
Read MoreEnvironmental progress arises from the momentum of mass movements, and from the bedrock of science and research. Yet it is difficult to find that which supposedly springs eternal. The diverse composition of Forces of Nature points to something more palpable than hope: the continued evolution of human understanding of the interdependencies of all life.
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