Reviews

I love it when poetry is an accidental present. When you blindly reach for the shelf and pull out a mirror on your own existence. Diamond Forde’s new poetry collection, The Book of Alice (Scribner, January 2026), is a story of survival, memory, and an elegy to a grandmother whose love and hardship grew from […]

Moshfegh does not want you to be comfortable with Eileen. In fact, every character has glaring faults.

Part of the charm of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is that it calls into question: what are the stories we tell and what are the stories we keep to ourselves-even from our own children?

Tolase is a Poet of form, weaving the poems into forms like acrostic, sonnets, ekphrastic etc. His usage of form throughout creates an open space for readers.

What he found was a little chunk of plastic, something that could have been a kitchen utensil, the foot or the arm of something, a piece of something bigger, some meaningless trash. No, that’s not quite right. For us, it’s meaningless, but for the kid it’s not. It’s everything for that kid. – From Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s “Trash”

Blackman’s writing feels as though you are present with her, sitting on a southern porch with a glass of sweet tea, listening to her grandfather in a rocking chair with a photo album reminiscing about how music brought two disparate communities together—Black and White during from the 1940s to the 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee.

We are presented with a pragmatic statement that honest writing requires artistic integrity, or at least a soundness of intention—knowledge that, for many of us, came only from trial and error, and an omnivorous literary appetite.

In Bryan Washington’s novel Family Meal, food is the simulacra, the ultimate symbol, of intimacy and well-being. And, these characters are defined by extremes — the feast and the fast.