Book Reviews – Page 4 – Michigan Quarterly Review

Book Reviews

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Hong Kong and the Hope of Cosmopolitanism: Reading Xu Xi’s Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

On or about the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing Twitter began to buzz with jokes about “the long 2020”—a riff on the convention in literary studies to speak of historical epochs like “the long eighteenth century.” (I can’t recall where I first saw the term, though it may well have been in a […]

Hong Kong and the Hope of Cosmopolitanism: Reading Xu Xi’s Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations Read More »

On or about the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing Twitter began to buzz with jokes about “the long 2020”—a riff on the convention in literary studies to speak of historical epochs like “the long eighteenth century.” (I can’t recall where I first saw the term, though it may well have been in a

A Review of Arji Manuelpillai’s Improvised Explosive Device

Arji Manuelpillai’s debut collection, Improvised Explosive Device (out now with Penned in the Margins) explores the precarity of human existence in a world where violence suffuses every interaction. This book peels back the skin of a society “gasping / like blood bags” to reveal a terrible, raw hunger underneath. Even the landscape is like a

A Review of Arji Manuelpillai’s Improvised Explosive Device Read More »

Arji Manuelpillai’s debut collection, Improvised Explosive Device (out now with Penned in the Margins) explores the precarity of human existence in a world where violence suffuses every interaction. This book peels back the skin of a society “gasping / like blood bags” to reveal a terrible, raw hunger underneath. Even the landscape is like a

Hunger and Home: A Review of Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever

What of tomorrow? Perhaps if you imagine a moment long enough, it begins to exist outside of time. The chai is always pouring. The tree never dies. It is raining forever. In Dur e Aziz Amna’s gorgeous debut, American Fever, readers can expect to find all the hallmarks of a bumpy adolescence—destructive confidence, crippling self-doubt, steamy crushes,

Hunger and Home: A Review of Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever Read More »

What of tomorrow? Perhaps if you imagine a moment long enough, it begins to exist outside of time. The chai is always pouring. The tree never dies. It is raining forever. In Dur e Aziz Amna’s gorgeous debut, American Fever, readers can expect to find all the hallmarks of a bumpy adolescence—destructive confidence, crippling self-doubt, steamy crushes,

Prayers and Incantations

            Roger Reeves’s second collection, Best Barbarian, confirms him as a remarkable poet. Reeves conjures poems in a language rooted in ancestral acknowledgment, metaphors, and rough tenderness, and finds balance within form while bringing the imperial spectrum of the ode and the elegy. The lines, the images, the terror, the joy, the beauty, and the horror cause the

Prayers and Incantations Read More »

            Roger Reeves’s second collection, Best Barbarian, confirms him as a remarkable poet. Reeves conjures poems in a language rooted in ancestral acknowledgment, metaphors, and rough tenderness, and finds balance within form while bringing the imperial spectrum of the ode and the elegy. The lines, the images, the terror, the joy, the beauty, and the horror cause the

A Poetics of Incompletion: Baudelaire’s Late Fragments

“What the mind creates is more alive than matter” – Charles Baudelaire, Flares This isolated phrase, the third entry in Charles Baudelaire’s aphoristic, incomplete collection Flares, takes on a new meaning in the context of a reader’s approach to this new translation of and introduction to Baudelaire’s late work undertaken by Richard Sieburth and forthcoming from Yale

A Poetics of Incompletion: Baudelaire’s Late Fragments Read More »

“What the mind creates is more alive than matter” – Charles Baudelaire, Flares This isolated phrase, the third entry in Charles Baudelaire’s aphoristic, incomplete collection Flares, takes on a new meaning in the context of a reader’s approach to this new translation of and introduction to Baudelaire’s late work undertaken by Richard Sieburth and forthcoming from Yale

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