Review of Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters (Little A, New York, 2025) Yes, you can go home again, but you might revert to the same person you were when you first decided to leave. Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters is a compelling examination of a daughter’s long-held resentment and fear of disappointing a parent, . . .
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His guests are still drinking, and the smoke from his meat fire rises, on this windless evening, straight up into the trees. – John Cheever, “O Youth and Beauty!” Are you filling your grill? Tis the seasonFor hanging outdoors under trees onA warm, sunny dayWith a brewski arrayand a comfortable lawn chair . . .
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A review of Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation, edited by Raouf Farrah and Suraya Dadoo. Pluto Press, 2026. During a 2025 residency in Lagos, I met with some of the local LGBTQ organizers hosting me. I was wearing a Free Palestine bracelet when someone asked me a . . .
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A review of When We Are Kin: The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity by Kyle T. Mays. Haymarket Books, 2026. A book subtitled The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity might be expected to open on a scene of communion. Kyle T. Mays opens instead with its breakdown. In his first pages he . . .
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There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.-Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida” Where the pelicans glide overheadAnd the whitecaps foam up like beer heads,There’s a cold one for you.Try a Florida brewBy the shore with your beach blanket spread. 1Keep this Fish Camp Pils chilled within reachFor your revelries . . .
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A review of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers (New Directions, June 2025) We Are Green and Trembling (2025), Robin Myers’s award-winning English translation of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel Las niñas del naranjel (2023) has already received significant international recognition, winning the 2025 National . . .
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A Review of Night Night Fawn (One World 2026) by Jordy Rosenberg. Among many human beings it is customary—has been, for a long time, in all kinds of places—for the act of giving birth to convey upon the birther a combined legal standing, quasi-proprietary status, cultural role, and economic function known as “motherhood.” If . . .
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On March 24, 2026, as Argentinians prepare to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’etat that initiated the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional—the country’s bloodiest and most violent dictatorship in its history—I want to revisit La historia oficial [The Official Story] (1985), the award-winning film directed by Luis Puenzo which exposes the . . .
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“The Sahara,” articulates Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward in her study of the desert in Arabic verse, “represents a location marked by fear, loss, exile, and emptiness, the result of destruction.” In Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025) Brahim El Guabli argues that this idea . . .
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A review of Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love (Harper Perennial 2025) by Zefyr Lisowski and Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) (Atria 2025) by Eleanor Johnson. I used to think I didn’t like horror films, but then, thirteen years ago, I met . . .
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