Out of Earth, the award-winning debut novel by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto, translated from Portuguese into English by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis, and published by Boiler House Press, is about digging. The digging is simultaneously of dead bodies from the earth, dogs dug from the body which invariably means violence is going to flare […]
Featured Reviews
Review: Sheyla Smanioto’s Out of Earth
Review: Mona Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel
by Jacqueline Schaalje
Familiar tropes from Arabic poetry, the loneliness of the desert, sweetness of roses, cups of tea, the intimacy of courtyards, tears, hearts, souls, night and weeping to the moon, which can all become quickly sentimental, abound in Mona Kareem’s bilingual I Will Not Fold These Maps. But they are given a new twist because they […]
You’re the Woods Too by Dennis James Sweeney
Review by Xander Gershberg
Dennis James Sweeney’s You’re the Woods Too—a hybrid collection of interwoven poems, journal entries, visuals, and stage directions—masterfully intervenes on literary and social figurations of nature in evocative language. Early in the collection, the speaker offers a definition of that operative concept: “Nature (n): the part of the world WE cannot control, no matter how […]
Hemley Boum’s Days Come & Go, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi
Review by Jacqueline Schaalje
This is the vividly told story of three generations of women (and their husbands, friends, sons, and lovers—not necessarily in order of importance) both in Cameroon and after immigrating to France. Major personal and historical events, such as Cameroon’s war of independence, are told through the eyes of one character, whose circumstances provide the background […]
“Your Eyes In the Darkness”
A Review of Rick White’s Talking to Ghosts at Parties
by Chase Erwin
White drags the reader, as if by the collar, through moments in time and space that reflect and refract each other, both literally and thematically.
Impossible Belonging by Maya Pindyck
reviewed by Barbara Schwartz
Lyrical, imagistic, playful, profound, Maya Pindyck’s new collection of poems, Impossible Belonging, celebrates abundance, welcoming Dickinson’s nobody and Whitman’s multitudes.
Review of Liminal and Nadir by Laura Fusco
translated from the Italian by Caroline Maldonado
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
Liminal and Nadir, two poetry books by Laura Fusco, present the voices of refugees in as direct a way as possible so we can feel and recognize their experiences.
The Owner of the Sea by Richard Price
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
The Owner of the Sea by British poet Richard Price, published by Carcanet, is a poetic retelling of three Inuit stories. It’s not a translation of those stories. They are based on folk stories told by elders and some other sources such as tales by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen. Price describes them as “poetry based on prose translations of live storytelling.” If you thought Inuit busy themselves with fishing and chewing seal skin all day long, let these poem refresh your perspective!
Shit Cassandra Saw: A Unique and Thrilling Debut
by Angelina Mazza
“Women can never be emancipated from the stupidity of men.” For MAYDAY, Angelina Mazza reviews Gwen E. Kirby’s remarkable, dark, biting feminist project, Shit Cassandra Saw.
Danae Younge’s Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots
Reviewed by Michaela Zelie
Danae Younge’s debut chapbook, Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots grapples with the loss of her father, missing history, and identity as multiracial queer woman in a cis-white-heteropatriarchy. Younge’s chapbook is composed of ten poems that orbit the persistent requirement of identification in spaces that I, as white woman, have been able to move fluidly through. […]