Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017. 736 pp. $40.00 (cloth). Like music, poetry—or at least our experience of it—is an art that unfolds over time. One cannot read every word in a poem at once, after all, and so readers must give themselves over to reading’s timeline. Without tools like …
Ecco, 2017. 320 pp. $26.99 (cloth) The Cincinnati Review will, in most issues, publish multiple reviews of the same book in the hope of presenting a rich and disparate commentary on the work. Overabundance in Made for Love Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is concerned with a would-be surveillance state, a place so eerily familiar …
Questions for the author That old-fashioned fish-wrapper, the Times Literary Supplement, sometimes asks its readers to try to find, say, the earliest telephone call in fiction. The earliest motorcar ride in a novel. The earliest excursion to the cinema. The first television. (As I write this, I half wonder: Did the old-fashioned TLS invent crowdsourcing?) …
Crawling Toward Authenticity Alissa Nutting excels at writing unlikable characters. In Tampa, her first novel, a middle-school teacher narrates (in explicit detail) her seduction of a fourteen-year-old student. Celeste Price has no redeeming qualities aside from her humanity, but one comes to understand that as much as she enjoys sex with boys, she feels trapped …
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, …