Mark Wagenaar’s piece, “Seventeen Fouettés,” brilliantly shows us how violence juxtaposed with art and poetic language can infuse even the saddest of situations with hope.
Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au is a short-story collection about stories—how narratives can be used to construct and deconstruct lived realities.
I was first drawn to Taneum Bambrick’s full-length debut Vantage (Copper Canyon, 2019) because it had “an ecological eye,” but after reading the collection, I realize how much of a disservice it is to characterize this book solely as environmentally urgent.
Parentheses usually indicate a digression, a nonessential thought, language without grammatical relation to its surroundings. Yet through them Lopez reshuffles the possibilities, demonstrating that what has been erased or discarded is often what is most essential, and ultimately questioning narrative-formation itself.
Tonight we the living gather to meditate on death—while eating hamburger sliders, in fact, and pumpernickel crackers spread with pâté, plus celery and carrots and various berries and wine that comes in a box but is not that tacky college kind. The spread is part of the funeral home’s Life Well Lived package, which also …
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
I’m walking into the quickening blizzardas if into a hunter’s dream— the flint arrow through my chest keenerthan earthly desire. Wherever I went teeth followed me, relentless as the shadowof the doe-eyed boy I thought I couldn’t live without. Long ago, lovemade all gestures of flowering possible on earth. Now I’m tired of livingon the …
