bLog
Book reviews, thoughts, and updates.
Jan 10
Book Review: "Border Lines: Poems of Migration" ed. Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters
A person is a person, no matter who they are, what they look like, or where they come from; if there is one thing these 122 poems have in common, it is that they show us how border lines are no excuse for denying anyone humanity, compassion, and kinship.
Jan 09
Book Review: Dawn Anahid MacKeen's "The Hundred-Year Walk"
With the help of Stepan’s meticulous journals, MacKeen reconstructs her grandfather’s journey on and off the page: she charts her travels through Turkey and Syria, tracing her grandfather’s footsteps nearly a century later.
Jan 08
Book Review: Tyree Daye's "Cardinal"
What I love best about Cardinal is the nuance and complexity with which it questions Daye’s conflicting desire to both stay in the South and leave, from his complicated relationship to the home that both raised and wishes to kill him to reflections on how being Black in America means being unsafe in America.
Jan 07
Book Review: Etaf Rum's "A Woman Is No Man"
Rum centers the misogyny that runs deep in conservative communities like the Brooklyn neighborhood in which it takes place, where women are beaten by their husbands and are thrust into traditional gender roles.
Jan 06
Book Review: Gavriel Savit's "The Way Back"
This meandering delight of a book takes you from a tiny shtetl in the forest to the Far Country of demons, goblins, and the spirits of the dead.
Dec 31
Books That Didn't Quite Make It Into Our 2020 Boxes
Our year-end roundup of the books that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut. Happy reading!
Dec 10
Book Review: Donia Bijan's "The Last Days of Café Leila"
From the Bolshevik regime to the post-revolution turmoil of the 1980s, the turbulence of the twentieth century serves as the backdrop for Donia Bijan’s sweeping tapestry of family, change, and homecoming, held together by food.
Dec 10
Book Review: Blue Delliquanti and Soleil Ho's "Meal"
A black-and-white graphic novel with a sweet, wholesome queer romance, Meal is a friendly introduction to entomophagy as both a millennia-old source of protein and an integral part of the cuisine of many different cultures.
Dec 09
Book Review: Chen Chen's "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities"
Chen Chen’s debut collection is an ode to the many complicated relationships of a young, gay, first-generation Chinese immigrant to America: with his family, with his culture, with his country, with himself.