There was no reason to see Terra shirtless so many times and at such length, but she insisted on taking off her bra—even when it wasn’t necessary, even when it inconvenienced the doctor—and so we sat, every two weeks, staring at her chapped nipples. “They’re supposed to look like this,” Terra assured us, though she …
Ugly Music. Diannely Antigua. YesYes Books, 2019. 99 pp. $18.00 (paper). Cruel Futures. Carmen Giménez Smith. City Lights, 2018. 88 pp. $15.95 (paper). Catechesis: A Postpastoral. Lindsay Lusby. University of Utah Press, 2019. 64 pp. $14.95 (paper). Soap for the Dogs. Stacey Tran. Gramma Poetry, 2018. 136 pp. $16.00 (paper). At times, it seems that …
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Nora Krug. Scribner, 2018. 288 pp. $30.00 (cloth). Scribner hedged its bets. When publishing Nora Krug’s Belonging (or Heimat, since the UK edition preserves the German title), they referred to it on the dust jacket as both a “visual memoir” and a “graphic memoir.” Most reviewers (the …
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Emil Ferris. Fantagraphics, 2017. 416 pp. $39.99 (paper). The other day while I was running my usual route along the river, I saw something near the trail that hadn’t been there before. At the base of a large maple, where a knot had formed around a gash in the bark, …
I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir. Malaka Gharib. Clarkson Potter, 2019. 160 pp. $16.99 (paper). An exuberant black-haired girl greets the reader on the cover of Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream. Her eyes are made of large starry American flags. Behind her, family members are inked in vibrant shades of red, …
In other people’s houses, the books on the shelf lean just so. The kids’ shoes shoved pigeon-toed into cubbies nuzzle companionably as unweaned pups.In one’s own house, not so. There it is almost impossible to love the octave wedged under the oven,the pianola’s dumb numbers, its tinsel scale.And impossible to decipher the life vest in …
Dead-end path through woodsin spring thaw prairie grouse stomps & booms on the lekpinnated subterfuge “repairs to a torn fabric” draglines & clay tiles in April breakinto lonely wild sounds two orange pockets appear & disappear in featherson predawn hilltop a sun a sail a shoot“Each life conveys to some certain center” she said a …
I marvel at his toes, how they hook into squaresof wire—a wasted deftness, going nowhere.He darts—one cornerto another—a mind racing between two solutions, both wrong.When I chase him to a stop under a table, I see the cherry pit of his heart trying to beat its way out of its cage.Who hasn’t looked upat something …
I come with the bones of my dead stacked like firewood in my arms,three snow buffalo I yoke to a lamppost,and ice in my goatee. You and your room are barely there, wisp of wallpaper curling from a missing baseboard.The world has turned past your drunkards and harlots. I remember vaguely Brodsky’s rebuketo those American …