Cissa Barbosa 10/30/22 Cissa Barbosa 10/30/22

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

Rarely do I encounter a work that speaks more to its zeitgeist than Chen Chen’s most recent poetry collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. While the subjects discussed are undeniably tragic—the racism Chen experiences as an Asian American, the Pulse nightclub shooting, his mother’s refusal to acknowledge his queer identity—the collection as a whole drips with sardonic humor. Chen manages to walk the fine line between mockery and hilarity without detracting from the collection’s impact.

Judy Xie 10/30/22 Judy Xie 10/30/22

Life Ceremony

Sayaka Murata’s prose is deadpan. She is straightforward - no frivolities– she has a knack for dark insight into everyday behavior cut down into a few simple words. Her newest book, Life Ceremony, is another display of this incredible talent. The characters are a mix of old ladies and young women who undergo transformation in the most absurd and unlikely places. By mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, Murata starts to push at the ordinary until it unravels into unusual shapes.

Yeukai Zimbwa 10/16/22 Yeukai Zimbwa 10/16/22

Please make me pretty, I don't want to die

Throughout his debut collection, we read and hear Mulalu stretch the lonely forms of elegy, aria, and sonnet to reflect the breakages of migration and the heart-politics of interracial intimacy. The choice of cover art (Władysław Podkowiński’s Frenzy of Exultations) is as much of a provocation as Mulalu’s epigraph to the first “Aria,” quoting Sylvia Plath’s use of the n-word in “Ariel.” Racialized aesthetics resound within Mulalu’s work, confronted variously with a skinned-raw hurt, an ambivalent probing, and with bleaker, Marecherian pronouncements like “All my poems are in whiteface.” Mulalu’s triad of film studies poems is notably adept at parsing this subject.

Skylar Wu 10/9/22 Skylar Wu 10/9/22

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel takes the reader on a poignant journey in an exploration of the simulation hypothesis and prospects of time traveling in her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility. Weaving together contemporary and historical tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic, World War I, and futuristic prognosis of potential technological failure, exemplified as the “file corruption” in the now parseable timeline (Part 6, Chapter 3). Mandel probes the apocalypse not as a source of mass panic but as a series of breakdowns in individual lives.

Mira Mason 10/9/22 Mira Mason 10/9/22

The Trees Witness Everything

The first thing you will notice about The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang is the shape of the book. An oddly tall, unusually narrow volume, it sticks out on any bookshelf you put it, among any stack of books it lies. It feels odd in the hands, as if it is both too much to hold but not enough to grasp. And when you do open it, another detail will strike you on the very first page: there are two poems, not one. A choice that defies the usual formatting of volumes of poetry, where each poem starts its own page.

Panagiota Stoltidou 5/1/22 Panagiota Stoltidou 5/1/22

Scattered All Over the Earth

Scattered All Over the Earth, the first installment of a trilogy by Japanese novelist Yoko Tawada, opens on the image of Knut, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, flipping through the channels on his TV and dozing off to its unintelligible hubbub. It is in this sluggish position that he chances upon the live recording of a studio program and gradually realizes that the panelists speaking are all people whose birth countries no longer exist. Though eager to change the channel – “this was much too heavy to relax to” – he practically slides off the sofa when the face of a young woman resembling an anime heroine appears on his screen.