The Literary Review

The Creation

      It was a dream of bodies  It was a dream of your body        unlocking itself from newly risen fields  It was a dream of you        materializing from the brown limbs of … Continued

A Mother

  Translated from Turkish by Nermin Menemencioğlu   The woman must have been out washing A bundle on her arm, her rough hands chapped with soda Like all Jewish women of her age She wore a faded black velvet coat … Continued

Bodacious

FOR ARCHIBALD J. MOTLEY’S BROWN GIRL     She’d walk up and take the sandwich from your hand to feed her kids She’d wear red ’round her rear on Sunday to Sunday service Her lips were painted red Her nails … Continued

Up the Mountain

translated from Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain     Rustling in the grass. A little squirrel hauls a large fluffy tail among twigs and branches an instantaneous flash. Empty mountain. Birds singing. Flapping feathers so minute, yet ubiquitous . . . … Continued

Review: Ghost Hour by Laura Cronk

(New York: Persea Books, 2020)   By middle-age, youth is a private letter tucked inside an envelope. No matter what emotions it stirs by looking back over it, the very fact of its presence makes one thing clear: We each … Continued

Review: Music for Exile by Nehassaiu deGannes

(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2021) In her stunning debut collection, Music for Exile, Nehassaiu deGannes acts as a symphonic or choral conductor, deftly incorporating a multitude of voices, themes, and structures from Kamau Brathwaite, Jay Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, the … Continued

Review: Shane McCrae

Books discussed in this review: The Language of My Captor (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) Sometimes I Never Suffered (New York: FSG, 2020) The Gilded Auction Block (New York: FSG, 2019)   As a first-generation white American, I have … Continued

Review: The Hare by Melanie Finn

(Colombus, OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2021) I have read the book to beat this year. Melanie Finn’s latest novel, The Hare, follows Rosie Monroe, an art school student living on her own in New York City in the 1980s, as … Continued

Review: Lord Baltimore by Peter Ramos

(Edmonds, WA: Ravenna Press, 2021) In Lord Baltimore, poet Peter Ramos offers a dark vision of mid-to-late twentieth-century America as a lonely urban and sub-urban, post-industrial wasteland. The poems, named for Cecil Calvert, the 18th-century patron saint of Baltimore, teem … Continued

Amy Pretends This Is Old Penn Station

The way she wears her sweater is so Sunday. If her parents were here she’d say why don’t you go watch Dancing With the Stars. It is every generation’s job to feel deprived. If she had kids she’s scared of … Continued

Manus

Yvette and I were in bed, watching through a gap in the curtains as my neighbor, Lou Spellman, stood at his mailbox and cried. The corner of the box was pressing into his gut, and he took a handkerchief from … Continued

Review: Snowdog by Kim Chinquee

(Edmonds, WA: Ravenna Press 2021) Raven with huge paws and a brown snout. Boots with an active tongue and a fluffy tail. Bird the husky mix who “sings.” Spiff. Doodle. Elle. These are but a few of the delightful dog … Continued

Review: In the Awakening Season by Matthew Mumber

(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press/Leapfolio 2020) In a slim paperbound volume, which sports a pale blossom on its rain-colored cover — reminiscent of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” — poet and oncologist Matthew Mumber’s thirty-nine poems offer a … Continued

Review: Arena by Lauren Shapiro

(Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State Poetry Center 2020) Lauren Shapiro’s second poetry collection, Arena, deals with a father’s attempted suicide and its traumatic aftereffects. These poems move back and forth between lyric and prose modes as the speaker seeks to bring … Continued

Review: Counterclaims by H.L. Hix

(McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press 2020) Toward. The word looks odd by itself, untethered from what’s behind, not yet having arrived at that which lies ahead. This untethered state is often mistakenly attributed to poetry and poets — it’s accompanied … Continued

Review: A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

(Los Angeles, CA: Unnamed Press 2020) Dark. Delicious. Smart and deeply literary. A novel of sublime prose and piquant wit, A Certain Hunger, by Chelsea G. Summers, is part psychological thriller, part unapologetic tale of sexual desire from a woman … Continued

Review: Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý

Translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Sheffield, UK: And Other Stories, 2020) Early in Swedish author Andrzej Tichý’s fifth novel, Wretchedness, this reader had the sinking feeling that the narrative would be a latter-day, sentimental retrospective on drug addiction and … Continued

Review: They Say Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard

Translated from French by Adriana Hunter (New York: Other Press, 2020)   Written in poetic, gorgeously sparse prose, Pauline Delabroy-Allard’s debut novel, They Say Sarah, captures the intensity of two women’s violent and obsessive love affair. Structured in two parts, … Continued

Penelope

                                              Weave a new tale for the clever queen. By day she weaves the shroud; by night she … Continued

“Hawks Do Not Share”

Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in 1925 when they were all living in Paris. The Great Gatsby had just come out and, according to Fitzgerald, “was not selling well but had very fine reviews.” Hemingway pursued the … Continued

Cyclones

    That night, as Sam slept, Daisy snuck out and drove out of town, the sky clear, the moon half-empty. Ahead of her the tail lights of a semi-trailer. She watched for the gleam of green deer eyes on … Continued

Review: Garden By The Sea by Mercé Rodoreda

Translated from Catalan Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2020) The rich have no concern for the poor. Or rather they live in their gilded mansions, eating expensive food, buying designer clothes, and traveling to exotic places, while … Continued

Joke

  When I mention a crush I have on some boy I’ll forget in three weeks’ time or never, call it love, Scuba, my closest friend, rolls his eyes, shoots back Did you pee on him so he’s marked as … Continued

The Prophecy

Holding my death in his mouth I’m reminded of a cat Snapping a canary up All blood and blonde feathers and grey fur Tiny beak and talons no match against that Merciless beast Poor creature  I have arrived here And … Continued

Review: Agnostic by Christopher Buckley

(Spokane, Washington: Lynx House Press, 2019) Already it is mid-July, four months into a global pandemic with no end in sight. From my fifth-floor balcony, I can see Freedom Tower. The infection rate in Hoboken remains uncharacteristically low for the … Continued

You Whom They Border

      you border crosser in this simulation you constantly slip and call one border by the other’s name the names aren’t straight inside of you and you conflate one with two because you still yearn for another border … Continued

You, Amateur Interpreter

  You would have told yourself as your mother sat in the dentist’s chair, had you known who Wittgenstein was then, “I have to imagine pain which I do not feel on the model of the pain which I do … Continued

Anniversary

      I haunt you because I love you. You are constantly surprised by this. I am made of papier-mâché. You have dreamt of this before, a serious matter. You delight in torment. We were made for this. I … Continued

Review: The Nail in the Tree by Carol Ann Davis

(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020) One night after three am, Carol Ann Davis holds her sleeping seven-year-old boy, Luke, as he shutters and mumbles from night terrors, “My boy wakes repeating I don’t know I don’t know.” After he … Continued

‘Mysteries of Small Houses’

    To put off doing what I need to, I plan a trip to Detroit with my mom. I spend hours looking at every Airbnb in the city, thinking of all the empty houses. There’s the ones that burned … Continued

Hearses

    A professor once wrote me that to write of fruit or flowers or dreams, no matter how deftly, is the lowest form of metaphor, after processions. Years later, on the subject again, she said that time indicted horses … Continued

Review: boysgirls by Katie Farris

(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2019) You don’t so much open this book as you step into it. In this pocket-size creation from Tupelo Press, featuring the arresting illustrations of Lavinia Hanachiuc, Katie Farris seduces us into an uncanny dimension … Continued

The Rat Problem

      The lady upstairs is yelling at her kids. I mean, really yelling. The high whine of these kids’ voices and the pitter-patter lightness of their footsteps suggest the oldest can’t be older than ten—or at least not … Continued

Historic District

    With purpose, you pull up the blinds. Light enters the room like a feeling violating a man. Sitting up in a bed built for a husband and a wife, I think for a second nature has taken us … Continued

Review: Creatures Among Us by Rebecca Lilly

(Frankfurt, KY: Broadstone Books, 2019) There certainly is a need for fantasy in our culture. Fantasy novels, sci-fi novels, manga, anime, adult fantasy fiction and films, fan fiction — the list runs like a stream into an ever-growing groundswell of … Continued

A Report on Forbidden Beverages

    For many years, I did not drink beer and then, suddenly, I did.  Before that, before I drank beer, I drank wine. For many years when I was asked at a party, at a gathering, at an event, … Continued