The poems in Kristen Tracy’s debut collection Half-Hazard (Graywolf Press) are warning signs in a big, dangerous world. Tracy leads her readers by the hand into a surreal landscape of circus animals, vampires, and the fields of Idaho. An author of twelve novels for young readers, Tracy brings all the magic and pain of adolescence…
Read MoreAs I was reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning, I found myself mentally clawing at the reflective prose for a direction. I was hoping to find a structure that lead both this book’s speaker and its subject to some unified conclusion. I was looking for distance, for the book to travel. I think, because of how much of this piece…
Read MoreIt’s like an intricately-versed, extra-high-definition nature special. Although its imagery is vivid, determining meanings in Jen Hadfield’s poetry collection, Byssus, can be as murky and sticky as trudging through a bog of mollusks. You may often struggle to peel the parasitic, wonky dialect and labyrinthine imagery away from the core…
Read MoreThe Voice at 3:00 A.M. is poetic pop. It’s easy to understand the broad appeal of Charles Simic’s work: his collection, The Voice at 3:00 A.M., has the unshakable aroma of compromise. By aiming to amaze everyone, it mainly just tickles, rather than truly resonating with, the individual reader. I found it promising but eventually…
Read MoreNever before has an elegy made me feel so giddy inside. Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed provokes the reader to completely rethink the concept of the elegy, warp it from a leaden dirge into a necessary foil of wit and celebration. No abysmal doldrums weigh this collection down. With childlike playfulness, the shamanistic Hicok yanks the sky down…
Read MoreIn recent months, after having caught a bit of outside light, Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, casts its shadows across every person who slips into its mesmerizing, 300-odd page world. After the emergence of Flynn’s second book, Dark Places, and her third novel, the unavoidable…
Read MoreI’ve never read a book written in the Korean language. As a native speaker of the language who has lived in the United States for over a decade, I can say this with modest shame, but I can’t help...
Read MoreMy virtual Amazon shopping cart is, at any one time, full of roughly six to ten books. These books are ones I plan on ordering and reading, books I’ve been recommended, books...
Read MoreThe Glass Castle is an intriguing memoir written from the viewpoint of Jeanette Walls—an introspective, adventurous and highly interesting character. Highlighting her struggle to overcome...
Read MoreIt’s been a month since Harry Potter and The Cursed Child was released, and I’m still grappling with my feelings about it. Allow me to backtrack. Like most twenty-somethings, I am deeply invested...
Read MoreMost readers are familiar with the writer Tim O’Brien because of The Things They Carried. The book, a staple of many many high school reading lists and a native to almost every...
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