Reviews

Denial is political

A review of Julie Carr's 'Rag'

I doubt “to be on the rag” existed as an expression or possibility before Eve and her husband trudged out of paradise into a world where the sky was lowered like a boom and the suburbs sodden with guilt and lust. The American King James Version lends God an especially cruel voice: “To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.”[1] And along with that, I imagine, came menstrual cramps.

On Lawrence Giffin's 'Christian Name'

Steven Zultanski

Lawrence Giffin’s Christian Name is a tricky book because it’s the kind of book that seems to do one thing and then actually does another.

Navigating the ineffable

A review of Prageeta Sharma's 'Undergloom'

Janice Sapigao

What happens to the woman of color body as it endures the banal repression of the academy? And if it aches to be itself without pressure to conform and meet assumed burdens to produce, publish, and exhaust itself to ‘fit’ while concurrently losing itself? Undergloom by Prageeta Sharma explores the thingification of the woman scholar and the way her mind must adapt to a tepid environment.

A review in turns of Eleni Stecopoulos's 'Armies of Compassion'

david wolach

Elizabeth Williamson

Strophe

Elizabeth Williamson: Throughout Armies of Compassion, Eleni Stecopoulos dances with this premise: that our bodies can act in concert in ways that both attend to and reject a “national past” (69) and its re/production of nationalistic violence.

Through and never through

On Peter Cole's 'The Invention of Influence'

Zack Finch

Peter Cole’s writing exemplifies Charles Olson’s notion that the poet is a transfer station, and that the poem “is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”[1]