The daring viewpoint of a homophobe widow makes for a toe-curling, but also hopeful read in the riveting Korean bestseller by Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter, dealing with the loneliness and ostracism of a lesbian couple and a single elderly woman.
Reviews
Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
“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.
Review of Liminal and Nadir by Laura Fusco
translated from the Italian by Caroline Maldonado
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
Liminal and Nadir, two poetry books by Laura Fusco, present the voices of refugees in as direct a way as possible so we can feel and recognize their experiences.
Motherhood and Mental Illness: On Blue by Erin Wilson
by Emilee Kinney
For a collection steeped in drowning, Wilson continuously keeps readers afloat, buoyed by the promise and ever-present force of a mother’s love.
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.
