Reviews

In “What It’s Like (Being a Brown Girl),” Cardona writes about “words too hard to pull from your throat,” yet she pulls the words out over and over again in this astounding collection of poems. Active in uplifting voices of the Latinx community, Cardona paves the way for Latinx writers with What Remains.

Black Buck is a novel that is immensely readable while critically engaging with questions that continue to define society’s relationship with race. As it inhabits a literary space that increasingly analyzes the tech world, in line with other current literary hits such as New Waves by Kevin Nguyen or Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte, it consistently underpins its story with a close point-of-view that exposes the implicit biases of said world.

Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz breaks all the rules with the breaks of her lines in Postcolonial Love Poem. In this collection, Diaz speaks through the native tongues of bodies groups that have been erased at the hand of the colonizer. She speaks of land, of rivers, of bodies, of love, and of the pain of a nation fighting to exist again.

The opening song, “Circle Of Life,” spread its unique mood to the entire The Lion King soundtrack, which became a childhood anthem for a generation of millennials. It was that authentic African voice, and that harmonious act by the South African choir and Carmen Twillie, that grabbed the audience’s attention. Their innovative performance evokes such deep emotion that it is clear why The Lion King has one of the most memorable opening scenes in animated cinema.

Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson’s Monster, She Wrote is an enchanting and necessary exploration of how horror has evolved since the seventeenth century—a genre that has made a fierce, subversive comeback in today’s publishing landscape. And women are at the center of it all.

If fiction is “the lie through which we tell the truth,” as Albert Camus said, then Siri Hustvedt’s fiction relays the truth that memory is more than just unreliable—it’s invented.

In Verge’s stories, Yuknavitch marshals her considerable talents and well-documented experiences—as a survivor of abuse, a recovering addict, and a self-proclaimed “misfit” (her pride in this appellation forming the basis of a famous TED talk and book, The Misfit’s Manifesto)—in service of illuminating the lives of women on the margins.

How do you start over when the world ends? There doesn’t have to be an apocalypse for life as you know it to tilt. These days, we wake up to headlines that read from a dystopian novel. And The Amateurs, the debut novel by Liz Harmer, has something to say to those who shelter in place about staying put, about love, and also about letting go.