Heather Lang: Taylor, thank you so much for chatting with me today. As you know from my previous note to you, I feel The Whetting Stone (Studio City, CA: Rattle, 2017) might be the most important poetry chapbook of the decade. Many … Continued
When I’m done, I take the elevator down. This gray morning feels like late afternoon. On the second floor, the man who walks like I once walked—two months ago—steps into the elevator, and exclaims, Good timing! Was he at physical … Continued
(New Jersey: Piscataway House Publications, 2016) It was night and forty degrees and spitting rain. Seated in a puffy chair, I was warm and dry and comfortable. Then I opened As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a new … Continued
In the very beginning, I spent time hoping that the baby would be human and not squirrel or—as I legitimately feared—possum. Why wouldn’t or couldn’t my uterus, an organ lined in risk and chance, twist the signal, cradle the curled … Continued
(New York, NY: Schaffner Press, 2017) Most people have felt it at one point or another: that dull ache in the center of your chest when someone ignores you. The slow wrenching in your stomach when you’re not being understood. … Continued
You are the late offspring of the last universal ancestor living by staid American suburbs where well-manicured lawns swallow the woods like summer fires dashing through grass. “If you are a deer, why should your head hang on a wall?” “If … Continued
(Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues, 2017) In Mark Irwin’s ninth full-length collection of poetry, A Passion According to Green, we find an accomplished and confident voice grappling with the realities of age, decay, and death, while also holding on tightly to … Continued
(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2017) Personal Science, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s third collection of poems, is a five-part work of cerebral art. It transforms the natural world into unexpected images while questioning differences between real and imagined human stories. It explores … Continued
Translated from the Japanese by Takuma Sminkey (Berkely, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2017) When In The Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma opens, a number of girls are working and playing in a narrow passageway by the water, a “safe … Continued
I’ve known little bitches like her all my life, their noses and butts stuck so high in the air you’d think St. Peter himself had goosed her. Haven’t I seen her mooning after the fathers like a kitten wanting nothing … Continued
“I don’t believe in poetry,” Brittany Perham wrote in her first book, The Curiosities (Parlor Press, 2012). “This might be the last poem.” After this, more poems followed; Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, August 2017), Perham’s second full length collection, which … Continued
My father wishes he could spit poisonous words at me, that his hatred could dissolve me like acid, I see this daily in his eyes. Meanwhile the French consul is furious and the police have come by for the third … Continued
Growing up black white trash it’s not that you Are and you never think you are Part of the home you go back home to Twenty years later and two thousand miles Lord just to look at it … Continued
(New York, NY: Catapult, 2017) On New Year’s Eve in an unnamed English village near Manchester, a visiting teenager named Becky disappears. The entire village assembles to look for her. Police and investigators swarm the village, the search goes on … Continued
The man who handles my call to the Department of Motor Vehicles is required to tell me that he’s a convict in one of our state’s prisons. Next he asks, “What can I do to help?” “My wallet’s been stolen. … Continued
—MILTON KESSLER What if California wasn’t the end of possibility? Gleaming out past Alcatraz and Coronado— someplace real to reach, if only you could walk across the water. Forget Manifest Destiny. What is ever manifest? What is destined? Today … Continued
Translated by Dominic Thomas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017) A fun fact I didn’t know before experiencing the short stories of Emmanuel Dongala: there are two Congos, with the two capital cities, Brazzaville and Kinshasa, directly across the Congo … Continued
When we (the members of the intern team) first endeavored to identify a theme for the 60th Anniversary issue, we came up with the idea of “Writers Respond”—responding to the times, their environments, major events, etc. It is a popularly … Continued
Time gives generously of its passage, and The Literary Review has been sixty long, prolific years in the making this fall. We’re celebrating our birthday with a special archival issue. We have, at last count (and we did count), published … Continued
Heather Lang: Thank you, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, for taking time out of your brimming schedule to chat with me about your art. As you know, I greatly admire your latest poetry collection, The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016), and am … Continued
(Ponte Vedra Beach, FL: Trio House Press, 2017) Have you ever stopped to watch a star or a tree, only to turn away after a moment? If you have, then you’re familiar with the feeling you get just as you … Continued
Translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2012) Quim Monzó’s a thousand morons is a flat book, and this can be either a good or a bad thing depending on which of its stories you’re reading. … Continued
Translated from the German by Katharina Rout (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2010) Born in Mongolia in the forties, Galsan Tschinag has lived a range of human experience I can only imagine: he has been, by his own description, a gatherer, … Continued
Yo pelearía a todo el mundo para ti. Si pudieras estar mi compañero, mi amante, ¿harías lo mismo para mi? ¿Por que no sonríes? ¿Estas recordando? Rememorar los tiempos en los que todos parecían mejores, en los que eras un … Continued
(Diode Editions, 2017) Attempting to write a review of a truly excellent collection of poetry often feels, to me, like an effort both heroic and idiotic. The critic Coleridge, once upon a time, described prose as “words in their best … Continued
Translated from French by Andrew S. Nicholson listen up earthen colors too late your laughter eats the sun for rabbits for chameleons grasp my body between two long lines when famine becomes light sleep sleep we feel so heavy blue … Continued
(New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) This debut novel from Sarah Schmidt takes as its subject the infamous Borden murders, still theorized and discussed more than a hundred years later, perhaps best known by the nefarious children’s rhyme assuming … Continued
Years ago, the wife of the married man I was seeing gave me a sort of maternal talking-to, which was generous on her part, if not a bit perverse, and which in some weird way, made sense: she was thirty … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: Primary Information & Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) “I’ve been seeing too many artists,” Constance DeJong tells us at the beginning of Modern Love. “I can’t go through life looking at how objects are colored, cut out and arranged. … Continued
As within the raucous meditations of high priests you find yourself moving and trepidatious and in the far black moving black trees. For once when I say you I mean you, the morphology pristine. You may not think there is … Continued