microreview & interview

Adrienne Celt on rivalry, time loops, and drawing cephalopods.

A conversation with Carlina Duan about her newest collection, “Alien Miss.”

Assistant Editor Taylor Byas interviews Matt Mitchell about his debut collection, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, in which Mitchell “spins us a record, songs of longing and love crooning from grainy speakers.”

An interview with Diamond Forde about Mother Body, her debut collection of poems. From reviewer Marianne Chan: “These poems—with brilliant images and startling musicality—resist erasure and destruction…”

Editorial Assistant Haley Crigger interviews Danielle Evans about Evans about the project of The Office of Historical Corrections, the role of risk and humor in fiction, and affirming Blackness in narrative.

A microreview of Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020) and interview with Jaswinder Bolina. “The book is the culmination of almost ten years of accidental prose. ….”

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.

by Jose Angel Araguz In “Rummage,” midway through CR contributor Jennifer Givhan’s Landscape with Headless Mama (Pleiades Press), the reader is presented a scene of a yard sale; the opening image of a wedding dress as “a white tumble / alongside registry gifts rattling our tarpaulined front porch” sets the tone. As the speaker details …

  In “The Miami River Floods,” from Rochelle Hurt’s collection In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street Press), the speaker addresses her father while watching footage of the Miami River flooding and speculates on the following: how many babies will be born tonight in heroic backseatdeliveries as cars float down the freeway? They will …

Leah Osowski’s poem “Vs. Field” is forthcoming Issue 13.2. In today’s blog post, Associate Editor José Angel Araguz reviews Osowski’s collection, Hover Over Her. by José Angel Araguz While reading Leah Poole Osowski’s Hover Over Her, I found myself coming back to the phrase “the poetics of suddenness.” Throughout the collection, moments are built up into a spark …