I’m making myself write this review because all my attempts to explain Ava Hofmann’s work to friends fail and I end up just saying, “You have to read it. You just have to read it.” Her latest chapbook, MY MY SUMMER OF TOTAL FFAILURE published this year in 2021 by The Offending Adam, is no […]
Reviews
Collaborative Gender(s): A Review of Ava Hofmann’s MY MY SUMMER OF TOTAL FFAILURE
Holy Dispatches: A Review of Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations by Kopano Maroga
by Robin Gow
Rightly dedicated to “Judas,” Kopano Maroga’s first collection imagines Jesus’s “lost years” as full of queer erotic bliss and newly vibrant prayers. In doing so, Maroga also weaves the voice of a more personal present-day speaker whose black queer self-celebration is a radical ritual. The title poem, “jesus thesis,” begins, “jesus was a […]
Our Small Faces by Jamie Moore Reviewed
by Raki Kopernik
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 […]
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 […]
