For a collection steeped in drowning, Wilson continuously keeps readers afloat, buoyed by the promise and ever-present force of a mother’s love.
Reviews
Motherhood and Mental Illness: On Blue by Erin Wilson
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. […]
Sex, Youth and Power in Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir
by Megan Jones
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is a novel with, as is increasingly prevalent in modern literary fiction, an “unlikable female narrator.” But her unlikability stems from her refusal to sugarcoat the realities of aging and its attendant loss of power.
Suspended in Middle Distance: On Arda Collins’ Star Lake
by Emma Daley
Collins’ spatial poems knit together the natural world––trees, light, stones––with her specific history of violence, loss, and survival.
We Are History: Ardor and Visibility in Robin Gow’s A Million Quiet Revolutions
by Katherine Fallon
Written in verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions queers both the novel and young adult genre by using altered form and subversive subject matter to break expected literary boundaries.
Barbara Schwartz & Krista J.H. Leahy’s Nothing but Light
by Emilee Kinney
Barbara Schwartz and Krista J.H. Leahy’s collaborative collection Nothing But Light is a spiritual journey that merges the female body with divinity.
Pinioned Wings: Love, Violence, and Spirituality in Hananah Zaheer’s Lovebirds
by Emma Daley
In her new chapbook, Lovebirds, Zaheer presents 12 vivid flash stories about relationships, faith, violence, loss, and desire.
Sellouts 1985: Patrick Süskind’s Perfume
by Brianna Di Monda
By co-opting the style and tropes of the Romantics and applying them to an ironic magical realism story, Süskind created a postmodern text liberated from the delusion of originality.
