Blog / Reviews

A Return to My Native Country

August 13, 2024 - By Aamer Janbey

A Review of Fadi Azzam, Huddud’s House. Translated by Ghada Alatrash. Northampton: Interlink Publishing, 2024. 
 

What does it mean to truly belong? Is it the soil beneath our feet? Or is it the echoes of our memories, the whispers of our ancestors, and the silent pull of our heritage? In a world fractured by displacement and longing, how do we reconcile the fragments of our identity with places we once called home? Can we ever truly return to these places?

As a twenty-one-year-old Syrian who has not set foot in my homeland for thirteen years, reading Fadi Azzam’s Huddud’s House was an...

Despite the Storm, Sikander’s Witness Stands Tall

July 19, 2024 - By Amal Zaman

“What's the problem of women? Knowledge! What's the problem of women? Their head, that's why they want to cut their head.”
—Nawal El Saadawi

In the early morning of July 8, as Hurricane Beryl cast the coast of Texas in darkness and disarray, a statue was beheaded on the University of Houston campus. This statue—a feminine figure commissioned from globally renowned artist Shahzia Sikander—had become the focal point of a campaign by the Christian anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life. In February 2024, this group, long active in the...

Three for the Fourth

July 3, 2024 - By Marsha Bryant

From the mountains and prairies, to ocean’s white foam:
Hail the beers of America. Let your tastes roam!
‘Twixt Atlantic, Pacific
Come brewers prolific
With tributes for toasting this spacious-skied home.

So gallantly streaming, beers pour
Into glasses and cups for the Fourth.
From the crisp, from the tart,
to the hoppy—the heart
Of the country pumps out brews galore!

Here are three for the Fourth just for you—
A wide-ranging assortment of brew.
One’s classic, one’s play-
ful. Nostalgia holds sway
In the last one I choose to review.

1
Ragged Glory—O long may it wave
With a fresh-hop approach and a fla-
vor that pairs with...

to cast a shadow for each other until we are bones

May 22, 2024 - By k

A review of The Girl Before Her by Line Papin (Kaya Press, 2023)

The road to the laundromat is iced all over and the wind is ruthless, blowing me back to the winter in Massachusetts, to the field of sunflowers, their eight-foot stalks almost depleted of moisture, their beehive heads bent over by snow, yet refusing to touch the ground. Suddenly this image comes to me: i’m running in the snowfield toward somewhere i don’t know, and a flash of light enters the corner of my eye—a silver figure running in my direction. We meet with a hug in the middle of the field (in an open field, everywhere is the middle). We hug without a word, feeling each other through layers and layers...

Partisan Review: Of Dreams and Hallucinations

May 14, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

It must be awful to be a Republican these days. So many reasons to be terrified: immigrants flooding across our borders, gender subversion from within, swarthy people rising from below, and so few of “our nation’s core principles” left unassailed. Even Sean Hannity, culture warrior supreme, can’t seem to keep up. How on earth to fight so many foes at once?

Enter Ethan Keller, a Hannity Show producer as well as cofounder and executive director of the Locke Society, an organization with its sights set on “ensur[ing] that the next generation of Americans is not overwhelmingly socialist.” Only by “encouraging the conservative youth to pursue careers in public and private...