A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon is a tender and sharp collection that navigates the history of “comfort women” used by the Japanese Empire during World War II. By bringing these events to the forefront of our minds and conversations, these
“In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade,” reads the final line of “Checkpoints,” a poem in Ilya Kaminsky’s forthcoming book Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019). In a lyric world uniquely his own, deafness and its sister sound, silence, become the central tropes of Kaminsky’s book-length
In his second novel Coyote Songs, Gabino Iglesias grabs readers by the wrist and guides them through a liminal space most readers believe exists a world away. In doing so, he illuminates the flagrant fallacy that there are some “very fine people on both sides.”
George Abraham’s new chapbook The Specimen’s Apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) accomplishes the painfully vital and often deeply violent work of imagining. In claiming two identities made systematically invisible (Palestinian, and queer), Abraham weaves us into worlds from which we are desperate to escape. Much like
Change is something that many of us strive for—changing ourselves, changing others, and, most particularly, changing the world. But too often we expect radical change without having to put in the work to achieve it; we ignore the arduous tasks that precede major transformation and