Patchwork
Patchwork is not just a novel or an absurdist work of art. It is a reminder that despite the chaos of it all, human beings will always be connected with one another. We will dance, persistently, precariously, along the same imprints in the dirt.
Love is a Dangerous Word
To crave sex with the dead, to be voracious in a time of AIDS, to masturbate and discuss it, to objectify one’s genitals purely for pleasure. In reading Hemphill’s work we do not ask the poet to take responsibility for his words and desires. We soak in them instead, learning how they resonate with our own thoughts and allowing his honesty to soften the edges of our judgement.
I Found Myself... The Last Dreams
I Found Myself itself exists as a tripartite translation, with Mahfouz moving from his unconscious to his conscious, and from the voice of the diarist to that of the writer, with Matar completing the process with a translation from Arabic to English. Matar’s remarkable ability to capture all of these dimensions, without sacrificing the stylistic qualities of Mahfouz’s prose, is what makes this translation so masterful. Whether you are interested in Arabic literature, a fan of Mahfouz’s work, or simply an admirer of dreams, there is something in this collection for everyone. If for no other reason than afterwards, after being engrossed in page after page of Mahfouz’s quiet serenity, you will feel as though you have made a new friend.
The Suicides
In the original Spanish, Di Benedetto distills his clear and incisive prose down to its indispensable elements. He then breathes life into it with plenty of Argentinian colloquial speech and occasional rhetorical flourishes. Some of it was left untranslated, like all the Spanish honorifics and several other words like patrón and tío/a. These small elements transport the reader to a Spanglish literary space, which an American readership usually associates with a space very different from 1960s Argentina: the South of the United States and the North of Mexico.
Real Americans
Rachel Khong’s sprawling novel Real Americans is an ambitious family saga. It chronicles the disparate perspectives of three generations in a single family: Lily, an unpaid media intern in New York City, as she navigates her romance with Matthew, an asset manager in private equity; Nick, her son, as he confronts the challenges of collegiate life at Yale and the mystery surrounding his father’s identity; and finally, Mei, Lily’s mother, as she reckons with her tumultuous past in China and her career as a geneticist. Despite their differences, these narratives dovetail into a profound exploration of identity – what defines who we are and how much of it can truly be changed.
The Skunks
With Isabel in tow, Warnick writes into the cracks of human experience in The Skunks—its slowness and moments of pause. The Skunks indulges in what happens between moments of definition or belonging. In The Skunks, Isabel is going nowhere really, but Warnick’s point, written in a subtle delicate prose, is that she doesn’t have to be. When the world and its infrastructure demands that Isabel define herself—her job, friendships, relationships, finances—Isabel resists, at least for the duration of the novel. We are soothed by her relative aimlessness. Maybe it’s okay to sit in a lack of definition, remain a little lost for a while, and, of course, mind the skunks.
Moving the Bones
Through tender verse, Barot precisely unfolds the body within this collection. Lungs swell, hands ripen, knees age—all reminders of impermanence and the physical. Barot’s language elevates these realities into moments of quiet reverence, of cherry blossoms, lungs, and Rembrandts; of standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear, ephemeral murmurs of meaning floating all around him.
Field Guide for Accidents
Starving and unstoppable: Albert Abonado’s latest poetry collection, “Field Guide for Accidents,” traces the paths of a lost poet unraveling his identity and his grief. Abonado uses each of his poems as bread crumbs—leaving behind trails of blood, fruit peels, tongues, and prayers—as the reader attempts to find where these paths converge.
d-sorientation
Charleen McClure’s d-sorientation is an exploration of space: the expansive empty inside humans and homes, the various rooms of the self, and how it feels to inhabit them. The selves she explores are alive and dying and dead, they are mosquitoes and mothers, and they are pressing their palms to the walls trying to map this space with their hands.
THE WESTERN IS A SPEECH ACT. RUN TIME APPROX 20 MIN
Sitting with this particular dimension of THE WESTERN––Goldsborough’s reflections on diasporic self-seeking and dreams of (re)convening with ancestors––returns me to the sculpture park at/of Opus 40. At one point in my wandering, I remember descending stone-cut steps while holding lightly to the stone-cut wall of a circular platform that the steps wrapped around. For a moment, I got the sense that I was walking through a corridor, or a larger stone enclosure, though Fite’s sculpture is not encompassed by walls.
Pig
Pig is arranged into three sections or acts: Straw, Sticks, Bricks—a reference to the three building materials that the fabled three little pigs construct their houses of to ensure, by the hair on their chinny chin chins, that the big bad wolf isn’t let in. This is the first of many pig references that appear throughout the text. Through this reference, Sax prepares readers to act as the wolf. They ask us to ready ourselves to consume the flesh and history of the pig. And so, we prepare ourselves to consume, not by huffing, puffing, and blowing through the material, but by reading voraciously through Sax’s porcine accounts.
Rouge
Mona Awad’s Rouge is obsessed with reflections— self-perceptions and the distortions that arise when we stare too long into ourselves. The novel centers around Mirabelle, a skin-care obsessed young woman dealing with the mysterious loss of her alluring mother, and seems to move in the same way that a hall of mirrors does: events and images spin around Mirabelle, never grounded in a concrete sequence, rather surreal and strangely saccharine.
Quietly Hostile
An unfiltered honesty defines Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile. A collection of seventeen, personal essays, the book offers a cacophonous blend of uproarious humor and intimate slice-of-life scenes through a straight-talking, comic persona that is endlessly entertaining. Irby leaves no stone unturned, exploring everything from the mundane to the absurd – she gushes about Dave Matthew’s greatest hits; she examines the eroticism of nun pornography; she thinks about whales while high; she relays her sexual trysts (most memorably, the one involving a golden shower) in gratuitous detail.
A Living Remedy
Nicole Chung’s Living Remedy is the first memoir I’ve read that made me cry. Part of this lies in the subject matter. The first section of Chung’s heartfelt memoir reckons with her status as a transracial adoptee, reared in the humble abode of a religious couple in rural Oregon. Growing up in an overwhelmingly white community that singled her out for her ethnicity, she grapples with questions of home, of belonging. She describes how her adoptive parents have difficulty relating to her because of this: “I could no more make them understand how it felt to be a Korean American adoptee than they could transfer their whiteness to me.”
Conspiracist Manifesto
The Manifesto is an exhaustive meditation on the relationship between leftist politics, conspiracy theories, and the pandemic. Written with a general audience in mind, the punchy and politically energizing prose of the book slots in nicely into the tradition of anonymously published, ultra-left French polemics. Like Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis and The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee, the Manifesto is written to inspire, keeping heady concepts and references to dead philosophers to a minimum. All the more remarkable for the density of its subject matter: the history of American psychology, sociology, and behavioral science and its synonymity with the history of American political suppression, counterterrorism, and pandemic preparedness.
perennial fashion presence falling
Fred Moten’s perennial fashion presence falling revels in the full sensuous range of poetic language as aural and visual medium. Animated by homonymous play and an ever-shifting typography, Moten’s new book of poems concerns itself with the question of whether a transhistorical self subjected to dehumanizing racial violence can be reclaimed or reasserted through art. How does one craft a black aesthetic toward this aim? What if the poetic “I” as a form of lyrical self-assertion has always been a myth, obfuscating the inherent collaborativeness of the artistic process as a natural complement to the mutuality of human life?
Famous Hermits
A profound love for the poetic word pervades every page of Stacy Szymaszek’s poetry collection Famous Hermits. Dialoguing with wordsmiths across history, from Dante to Bram Stoker to Alice Notley, the first half of her collection contains poems that are in and of themselves experiments in structure, rhythm, and white space in the vein of anti-poetry.
The Nursery
Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel The Nursery is visceral and uncomfortable— Molnar presents the reader with a portrait of new motherhood with all its agonies, its unscrupulous disasters. I chose the novel partly because the cover, blurred and simplistic, intrigued me. After reading a couple of pages, I realized the image was that of a lactating breast, a symbol usually associated with nurturing, the beauty of loving and caring for an infant. Yet Molnar’s novel is interested in those moments of motherhood so often glossed over by the glorifying eyes of the reader: moments of intense isolation, physical pain, and resentment towards the narrator’s own child, unsentimentally referred to as “Button.”
Monstrilio
Gerardo Sámano Córdova's fantastic literary debut, Monstrilio, may market itself as a tale of horror, but it feels more like an exploration of desire— strange, queer, burning desire, at its most grotesque and gripping. Out of Córdova's delicate balance between the mythic and the modern emerges a tale of a grieving mother who covets a portion of her dead son’s lung until it grows into something new: not her beloved Santiago, but an insatiable and violently hungry animal, a being neither human nor deniable.
Ghost Music
An Yu’s Ghost Music is one that feels intimately real and hypnotically unreal in equal measure: at its heart, it is a domestic drama, chronicling Song Yan’s humdrum existence as a piano teacher slash failed concert pianist alongside the collapse of her marriage with Bowen as the secrets of his past are brought to light; yet, anchoring Yu’s story is the surrealism of talking mushrooms, strange orange dust that befalls Yunnan, the lulling refrain of Chopin’s Rêverie, and the seeming specter of Bai Yu, a once world-famous, presumed-to-be-dead pianist. Earthly reality and phantasmagoria collide to create a haunting dreamscape that manages to be, at its best, quietly atmospheric and profound.