This review is a reprint. It was originally published by fsm. Review: tommy wyatt blake’s MIASMAMIST: a poetic display of egoist anarchy As the narrative begins, a nameless figure hands over their business card, yet no name or job title appears—instead, the card bears a grimly honest statement about the reader’s life: “trust me, i’m […]
Featured Reviews
Review: tommy wyatt blake’s MIASMAMIST: a poetic display of egoist anarchy
Review: Fatemeh Shams’s Hopscotch
translated from the Persian by Armen Davoudian
by Mahdi Ganjavi
In The Beginning, There Was Translation Hopscotch (Falschrum Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024) is a collection of 13 poems in Persian by Fatemeh Shams, accompanied by their English translations by Armen Davoudian, and a series of evocative photographs by Stefan Maneval. This collection delves deeply into the themes of exile, memory, and the internal […]
Review: Miguel Avero’s Aguas/Waters
translated from the Spanish by Jona Colson
by Pepper Cunningham
Aguas/Waters is obsessed with dichotomies; the relationship between earth and space, the thin film between strangers and people we think we know, the struggle between naked truth and blissful ignorance, the heartache between presence and absence.
Review: Marlon Hacla’s Glossolalia translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim
by Jacqueline Schaalje
“Can our rot ripen? According to the books, our future is on fire like a child pelted with kerosene and lit, pushed to start walking. (‘Stairs’).”
Review: Sheyla Smanioto’s Out of Earth
by Jacqueline Schaalje
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 […]
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.
