“I think it’s time to question what we ask of authors, particularly new authors, in exchange forpaying attention to them,” Portalmania author Debbie Urbanski wrote in a recent LitHub article,raising important questions about personal boundaries in the context of book marketing, thaticky blood ritual of churning out social media posts, podcast interviews . . .
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And malt does more than Milton canTo justify God’s ways to man. –A. E. Housman There are Porters and Stouts; there are Browns.(And these beer styles are rightly renowned.)Though I’ve tried quite a few,I’ve sought differently brewedTypes of malty. Come taste what I’ve found. And before it gets sultry outside,while a vestige . . .
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Across twelve chapters, Beliso-De Jesús presents the history of medicalized state-sanctioned violence via excited delirium syndrome through a compelling combination of historiography, ethnography, and memoir. Peppered throughout the text are the author’s personal stories and interactions, which help contextualize the far-reaching implications of the diagnosis and her positionality as an Afro-Latiné woman and scholar researching the spectrum of Black and Brown death within the U.S. carceral system.
Read MoreIs anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst February 14 to May 9, 2025 As I stepped into the main gallery of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA), I was confronted with the question—Is anything the matter?—splayed across the entry wall. Instinctively, . . .
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A Review of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author “Creation flows both ways” remarks Ankara, the robot and author of the novel embedded within Nnedi Okorafor’s latest speculative masterpiece, Death of the Author. This sentiment, something “humanity could never bring itself to believe,” is a prescient reminder that the act of creation . . .
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A Review of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (Hogarth 2025) “I wanted to take pictures, I thought, because exile made my parents’ lives a mystery to me. I wanted to archive my life, to have irrefutable testimony,” says Nila, the protagonist of Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl. Good Girl tracks the artistic . . .
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A Review of Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024) Like a deep breath, like a flower that blooms against the relentless elements of an inhospitable season, Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World begins with “Sudden Hymn in Winter,” a short but powerful poem, functioning almost as the collection’s own . . .
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Jon Hoel: The natural world is pretty frequent in your work over the years; in these recent poems, though, there are two terms specifically I wanted to ask you about, “decolonization” and “land back.” Both are ideas many people are likely familiar with, but some might not be. I was curious what . . .
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A Review of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024) “The green jacket, the ceremonial stones, breakfast with Manu, the Dame on the terrace, and the shapes of poems,” goes Ayşegül Savaş’ magpie-like narrator Asya as she meticulously collects objects and moments with her partner Manu to build their nest, two ex-pats in an unnamed . . .
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Phil Elverum, photo by Katy Hancock Poems are songs, songs are poems. This dictum may infuriate anyone who has ever penned an editorial on Leonard Cohen’s songs or anyone who was irate when the Nobel committee declared Bob Dylan was literature. Those familiar with the history of songwriting, however, might be inclined . . .
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