All posts filed under: Book Reviews

Longform reviews of poetry books.

From Witness From Speech From Image: On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

Published by Staff

Summer Farah | Critic at Large This essay is also available as a print zine through Open Books. All proceeds will be sent to Gaza Poets Society. The Arab Apocalypseby Etel AdnanLitmus Press, 2007 First Published by Post-Apollo Press, 1989 Dicteeby Theresa Hak Kyung ChaUniversity of California Press, 2022First Published by Tanam Press, 1982 In a Western Art History course, I learned to read images—to follow the eye, from the top left corner to the bottom right as if I was reading a page of words in English, but to let the artists’ lines guide and redirect my focus. To understand what the image is doing by identifying these moments of departure. I also learned art history as a comparative practice: to speak of an era is to put a collection of paintings next to each other and make conclusions about the time, to consider the world that presses into the frame. Before I am an editor, poet, critic, or any kind of writer, I am a reader; I want to follow the feeling. Reading …

Dreaming the Living and the Dead: On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa

Published by Staff

“Dreams, like letters or memories or photographs, can resurrect the dead, and the dead arrive throughout this book.”

Friends, or All That Is Knowable

Published by Gabi Graceffo

“As these odes accrue, they flesh out a life lived in company, which is quite the opposite of the solitary character of the Mary Ruefle I’ve long held in my mind.” —Tyler Barton

I Unthread and He Arranges Me

Published by Nanya Jhingran

Looking, we are reminded again and again, is, too, about being looked at, about where, in the act of looking, agency and power begin and how that changes depending on who is doing the looking.

Strange and Funny Doors of Deep Feeling: Michael Earl Craig’s Iggy Horse

Published by Gabi Graceffo

Horses, capable of deep knowing, stride alongside animate eyeglasses, mysterious flecks of trash, and coy, almost-ever-present lawnmowers.

I Am Finished With History

Published by Nanya Jhingran

“The hallowed argument goes: The artist has vanished but the art lives. Franklin adds: Art lives and so does the materials that made the art. They mark us as much as we’ve manipulated them.” -Esther Lin

So You Are Here, and There Still

Published by Nanya Jhingran

“Throughout Metzger’s poems, we experience an artist patching together experiences– present and past–, sometimes creating tectonic friction between them, in order to dwell on the meaning of life.” -David Roderick

Part Animal Born of Lake: On Anne Haven McDonnell’s Breath on a Coal

Published by Gabi Graceffo

An “other”-oriented text, Breath on a Coal, with its promiscuous curiosities, its investments in recovering our own animality, articulates the disorders of our human subjectivities.

Dreamlike Transformation: On Gabriella R. Tallmadge’s Sweet Beast

Published by Claire Tuna

“. . . the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”

An Empire Elsewhere

Published by Nanya Jhingran

Ceballos captures the violent reality oppressed and exploited people face due to U.S. involvement in their home country’s economy and politics that force them to eventually leave. Through elegies, we’re made aware of the horrors they face after fleeing to the U.S.