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, …
Be Recorder. Carmen Giménez Smith. Graywolf, 2019. 88 pp. $16.00 (paper). Grief Sequence. Prageeta Sharma. Wave Books, 2019. 104 pp. $20.00 (paper). Dear Delinquent. Ann Townsend. Sarabande, 2019. 72 pp. $15.95 (paper). More and more, our lives are built around a persona we skillfully weave on social media. It doesn’t matter what you do for …
The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion. Sonja Livingston. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 184 pp. $17.95 (paper). As a vehicle for exploration, the spiritual memoir gives us two worlds, one of facts and things and one of the transcendent; its work is in demonstrating how to pass from the one to the other, …
Convenience Store Woman. Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Grove, 2018. 176 pp. $20.00 (cloth). Convenience Store Woman is a short volume that fits in hand, purse, or satchel and can be sneaked out and read in little bursts, as quick as popping a Tic Tac. I have read it three or four times, …
Undermajordomo Minor. Patrick deWitt. Ecco, 2015. 336 pp. $26.99 (cloth). And a related question, perhaps more useful: what is the relationship between occupation and genre? Somebody needed to rustle up a herd or two of cattle before Owen Wister could write The Virginian. Dashiell Hammett’s objective narration in The Maltese Falcon would be awfully dry …
The Factory. Hiroko Oyamada. Translated by David Boyd. New Directions, 2019. 128 pp. $13.95 (paper). What is factory work? Is it solely labor that takes place within what is traditionally understood to be a factory? That is to say: manufacturing or machine work? Is this understanding too narrow? Is this understanding classist, defensive, an illusion? …
Disappearance: North Sea Poems. Lesley Harrison. Shearsman Books, 2020. 78 pp.$18.00 (paper).Civil Bound. Myung Mi Kim. Omnidawn, 2019. 96 pp. $17.95 (paper).Colonize Me. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Saturnalia, 2019. 112 pp. $16.00 (paper).Doomstead Days. Brian Teare. Nightboat Books, 2019. 176 pp. $17.95 (paper). This spring, during Michigan’s stay-at-home order in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I …