An eddy, the titular inspiration for this show, is a flowing water phenomenon where the current is disrupted by inverse movement, causing a whirlpool. This exhibit of young emerging sculptors makes a similar gesture against a cultural current, long spiraling toward doom. M23 is a small gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the […]
Featured Reviews
Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
Reviewed by Sophia Kaufman
At the end of Ziwe Fumudoh’s Instagram Live shows this summer—in which she quizzed her guests on civil rights leaders, asked them whether they’d ever worn blackface, what they qualitatively like about Black people, how many Black friends they have, and whether they would commit to reparations, among other rapid-fire prompts often tailored to her […]
Explorations in Friendship & Witchcraft in The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
by Aya Kusch
Long before Sephora started selling “Starter Witch Kits” and books with titles like Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive became mainstream, the Mexican-British surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington, was conjuring her own magical realms with the help of paint and the written word. Her wild life was marked by adventure, rebellion, and an irrepressible desire to create. […]
Peter Milne Greiner, Temporal Cyborg
Reviewed by Christopher Cokinos
Lost City Hydrothermal Field by Peter Milne Greiner The Operating System, 2017 148 pp., $18 The poet David Wojahn has made the distinction between the poetry of stuff and the poetry of wisdom. The former, he claims, is the deployment of references in often pell-mell fashion; it does clutter so much poetry today, especially that […]
Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
(reviewed by Brian Satrom)
THOUSAND STAR HOTEL by Bao Phi Coffee House Press (2017) 110 pages reviewed by Brian Satrom What authors empathize with in their work can reveal a great deal about their perceptions of themselves. The poem “Not a Silverfish,” toward the end of Bao Phi’s second collection, Thousand Star Hotel, has the speaker imagining the perspective of […]
Poems in Water by Mary Langer Thompson
(reviewed by Carol Smallwood)
POEMS IN WATER by Mary Langer Thompson Green Fuse Poetic Arts (2014) 57 pages reviewed by Carol Smallwood Every poetry collection creates its own sense of space: geographic, cultural, and personal: word selection and use are fingerprints of each writer. The reader tastes a new world and if the poet is good, the world is […]
Velvet Rodeo by Kelly McQuain
(reviewed by Marc Frazier)
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain Bloom Books (March 2014) 42 pages reviewed by Marc Frazier This collection takes us on a journey back to our roots as individuals largely shaped by family. There are siblings here, parents, even a step-grandfather. Though the poet is gay, he is not slavishly bound to writing strictly from that […]
