Early in Michael Earl Craig’s Woods and Clouds Interchangeable, forthcoming from Wave Books, there’s a poem that I would argue serves as key to reading the book—and Craig’s work overall. Specifically, it is the first stanza of “The Rabbit,” the collection’s third poem: I remember
The realm of storytelling is a sacred one, and not just for authors and readers, but for our culture as a whole. As the novel makes readily apparent, if we neglect or ignore our collective pasts, our stories, then we risk losing the most important part of us forever.
Note the first rule of an Oyeyemi book: there are many ways of seeing—nothing is more arrogant than trusting only one set of eyes.
Guided by poets including Shakespeare, Homer, and Milton, Principles of Economics asks: can we stave off or transform grief by creating a faithful copy of the departed, by remembering everything in the manner of Borges’s Funes?
In this collection the social scale is high and expensive: in London one of the couples stays at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, and Potomac Run, a variation on the Homestead in Virginia, can be patronized only by the well-heeled.
Tradition The Tradition, Jericho Brown’s first book of poetry since his award winning The New Testament was released in 2014, is nothing short of a transcendent collection. Part ethnography and part odyssey, it explores in three sections, themes of masculinity, sexuality, and race utilizing “tradition;”