I love novellas. Small books that don’t weigh down a bag or cramp your arm when held upside down, a book that won’t give you a bloody nose if it falls on your face when you’re reading in bed, and a beautiful cover that you can look at and breathe in when you need a […]
Reviews
Our Small Faces by Jamie Moore Reviewed
One Who Was Not Devoured: A Review of Liz Kay’s The Witch Tells the Story and Makes It True
by Katherine Fallon
Liz Kay’s The Witch Tells the Story and Makes It True (Quarterpress, 2020) is a confession, but not one that begs any kind of forgiveness. It is a series of persona poems marking the developmental path of a girl born with powers, and who she becomes as a result of various abuses and an unbreakable […]
Welcome Hauntings: A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness
by Robin Gow
In God of Nothingness, Mark Wunderlich’s poems conjure reluctant ghosts and waltz with rusted memories. Embracing regret, grief, and death, this collection makes mourning and melancholy tangible, intimate moments through earthy lyric. By sharing his vibrant hauntings, the speaker delivers brief afterlives to loved ones, landscapes, and saints, all the while asking, “Who witnesses our […]
Gina Prince-Bythewood: Feminism Frame by Frame
by Jennifer Gauthier
Four minutes into The Old Guard, released this summer on Netflix, Charlize Theron’s character Andi savors a piece of baklava and pinpoints exactly where it came from: “Hazelnut, not walnut. The Black Sea. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Eastern Turkey?” She’s right, of course – anyone who has eaten baklava for 6,000 years has learned a thing or […]
Please keep a safe […]: Chin Chin – Grass Jelly Drinks
by j.p.mot
j.p.mot’s object of research centers on reclaiming the orientalist gaze depicted by colonial ethnographers. Within his creative process, he is interested in serendipity and in-situ chance encounters leading to the creation of mixed-media installations. These diverse assemblages center around the study of canned humor and subversive semantics underlined by words, characters, corporate branding, and iconographies […]
Apocalypse Singing: A Review of Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder for Pandemic Times
by Robin Gow
In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come. The collection’s striking red moon cover drew me in with its strangeness. There’s something ominous […]
Feminist Flashback: The Woman’s Film
by Jennifer Gauthier
I can’t remember precisely the first time I saw The Woman’s Film, a collaborative short documentary made by San Francisco Newsreel in 1971, but I do remember being struck by its boldly feminist mode of address and content. It has stuck with me for years and now I use it in class anytime I can. […]
Review of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov
by Aya Kusch
Helen Frankenthaler was adept in the art of getting noticed. On May 19, 1950, she donned a costume meant to transform her into a Picasso painting and made her grand entrance into the Astor Ball flanked by an actress friend, Gaby Rodgers. Fresh from college and largely unknown, Life magazine found her eye-catching enough to […]
How Justine by Forsyth Harmon Taught Me How to Feel
by Aya Kusch
A few days ago, I was talking with a friend, and I told her that teenage girls must have superpowers that temporarily bestow them with emotional endurance beyond what anyone else in any other demographic could hope for or imagine, and it’s amazing that anyone survives girlhood without needing tons of therapy afterwards. Her […]
Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
by Corey Durbin
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 […]
