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book review

The book cover of Roberto Tejada's Why the Assembly Disbanded: Poems, featuring a photograph of a largely empty room, over a dark abstract background.

I Assemble, I Am: A Review of Roberto Tejada’s Why The Assembly Disbanded

Assemblage is a danger. Artists, poets, immigrants, outsiders, and insiders—to gather is to think, to subsist off bounce-backed ideas, language, identity. To assemble is to resist abidance. To birth that which is new, to resist, to polish that which is worn-out. Why the Assembly Disbanded by Roberto Tejada endeavors to assemble the heart of assemblages; […]

I Assemble, I Am: A Review of Roberto Tejada’s Why The Assembly Disbanded Read More »

Assemblage is a danger. Artists, poets, immigrants, outsiders, and insiders—to gather is to think, to subsist off bounce-backed ideas, language, identity. To assemble is to resist abidance. To birth that which is new, to resist, to polish that which is worn-out. Why the Assembly Disbanded by Roberto Tejada endeavors to assemble the heart of assemblages;

Image of the cover of H.R. Webster's book What Follows over an abstract background.

A Review of H.R. Webster’s What Follows

H.R. Webster’s What Follows is a book of abolitionist love poems. It’s about the long fight of love, elegiac love, about loving the rough, bruised contours of love, about the shedding of systems that are not love. What makes us good, Webster argues, is not our purity or our fear. These poems make room for

A Review of H.R. Webster’s What Follows Read More »

H.R. Webster’s What Follows is a book of abolitionist love poems. It’s about the long fight of love, elegiac love, about loving the rough, bruised contours of love, about the shedding of systems that are not love. What makes us good, Webster argues, is not our purity or our fear. These poems make room for

A Review of Sarah Heady’s Comfort

When poet Sarah Heady was a writer-in-residence at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, she found a pile of magazines in the attic of the farmhouse where she was staying. She discovered that these were issues of a women’s magazine called Comfort that had been published between 1888 and 1942. Its tagline read “The Key to

A Review of Sarah Heady’s Comfort Read More »

When poet Sarah Heady was a writer-in-residence at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, she found a pile of magazines in the attic of the farmhouse where she was staying. She discovered that these were issues of a women’s magazine called Comfort that had been published between 1888 and 1942. Its tagline read “The Key to

The cover of Salah el Moncef's "Benghazi" over an abstract background

“An Enormous Enigmatic Signifier”: Salah el Moncef’s Benghazi

In her Introduction to The Offering (2015), Mari Ruti characterizes Salah el Moncef’s extraordinary novel as a “gripping detective story of murder, mayhem, and mental illness.” At the same time, she is quick to explain that while readers may be rendered “breathless” by this layered, at times frenetic, narrative, it is hardly the novel’s only

“An Enormous Enigmatic Signifier”: Salah el Moncef’s Benghazi Read More »

In her Introduction to The Offering (2015), Mari Ruti characterizes Salah el Moncef’s extraordinary novel as a “gripping detective story of murder, mayhem, and mental illness.” At the same time, she is quick to explain that while readers may be rendered “breathless” by this layered, at times frenetic, narrative, it is hardly the novel’s only

Cover of the book featuring a purple figure against a red-orange background laid over a simple abstract background.

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

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