“Latasha could avoid some stalkings, but avoid them all? / Avoiding them all could mean a mean vitamin C deficiency.”
Courtney Taylor, “Concentrate”
Read More
“Laughter shakes us out of our deadness,” Nuar Alsadir declares in her new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation. Alsadir, an award-winning poet and psychoanalyst, weaves her personal experiences into critical interventions of texts like the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Anna Karenina, and Donald Trump’s tweets to argue that laughter is a radical act of self-revelation, a means of exposing the self.
Read More
Anxiety. Depression. Who hasn’t felt either or both at one point in their lives? But when we toss those words around carelessly, identities form.
Read More
Queer joy. Just like there’s no singular queer experience, there’s not one definition of queer joy—its meaning is personal, individual.
Read More
In her story “On the Train,” Lydia Davis describes a trip in which she and another passenger “are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners.”
Read More
In Vanessa Onwuemezi’s debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood, disaster has already come and turned out the lights. The sun has gone home early in most of the stories, and with the sun, so has gone the world, the familiarity of a home and a boundary.
Read More
Writing a review some months after a critically acclaimed book has been released can be a challenge. Generally, all the good words have been taken, and you have to claw through the ground looking for an unused noun, surreptitiously create a new adjective out of dried grass, an errant dandelion puff, and some spit.
Read More