bLog
Book reviews, thoughts, and updates.
Nov 10
Book Review: Billy-Ray Belcourt's "A History of My Brief Body"
Part-essay, part-prose poem, A History of My Brief Body remakes the form of the memoir, just as Billy-Ray Belcourt unmakes and remakes himself in these pages.
Nov 09
Book Review: Natalie Diaz's "Postcolonial Love Poem"
These poems contain a violence that refuses to be healed from, a violence of knives and scorpions and bullets whose sting is transformed to light and tenderness under Natalie Diaz’s deft hands.
Nov 09
Book Review: Dina Gilio-Whitaker's "As Long As Grass Grows"
Dina Gilio-Whitaker paints broad strokes exploring an Indigenous-centered history of environmental (in)justice in North America, from the coordinated uprooting of First Nations people from their ancestral lands to modern environmental efforts like Standing Rock.
Nov 07
Book Review: "Love After the End" by Joshua Whitehead (ed.)
Every single one of these stories offers hope as a form of resistance against everything terrible that was, is, and could be.
Nov 07
Book Review: Waubgeshig Rice's "Moon of the Crusted Snow"
For a people who have lost everything time and time again, this is just another chance to adapt, and this time, maybe reclaim the land stolen from them so long ago.
Oct 10
Book Review: Harmony Holiday's "A Jazz Funeral For Uncle Tom"
The poems themselves are dripping with images, with winding, wending sentences that pivot on certain words to twirl around fear, love, hate, and loss. Holiday wheels from Jim Crow to Justin Bieber, drawing from centuries of Black experience for her lyric and prose fragments.
Oct 09
Book Review: Amina Gautier's "The Loss of All Lost Things"
True to its title, The Loss of All Lost Things is a collection of short stories about various losses: of youth, of hope, of love, of relationships, of culture, of self.
Oct 08
Book Review: Rivers Solomon's "An Unkindness of Ghosts"
Solomon through Aster continually questions the value of the past we have: without a living connection to the past, what are we? Are we free, or are we lost?
Oct 06
Book Review: Zahra Patterson's "Chronology"
Through the lens of attempting to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Patterson explores themes of colonialism, feminism, the politics of translation, and language as a form of intimacy.