“If you don’t know it, make it up.” Thus Sasha Banks implores Black Americans to reshape America in our own image in a poem from her first full-length book, AMERICA, MINE In a poem that echoes an exam-- either for school or for citizenship, Banks asks us to record what we remember of an America that has passed away into memory, throwing into doubt everything we thought we knew about history.
THE PAPER CAMERA opens with the voice of someone reporting from the end of the world, giving the text the tone of a dispatch.
“A young girl / sticks her tongue / out at a gun—” Disparate moments press together in memory, over the breadth of space, anchored by architectural details such as a window, and by landscape markers, like lemon trees, connected by the tanks rolling by. The tongue, and therefore language, becomes a weapon.
Zahia Rahmani's "Muslim: A Novel" is at its core a warning of the danger and violence of distilling human life down to a single identity label: religion, gender, or nationality. It also warns against the violence of erasing any part of one's life that encompasses those identities and cultures: the colonized who are forced to stop speaking their language, or oppressed groups who are forced to assimilate into the dominant culture while their own cultural practices are demonized and marginalized. This is the tension of the novel, pulling between multivalent life and erasure.
Emmalea Russo’s G is doing several things at once.
By employing a hemispheric division, creating borders reminiscent of a hem, the poems’ form resembles, on one side, a raised garden bed. On the facing side, the prose-poem rests on the bottom of the page, creating a ground. As in a painting, the ground creates, not a negative space of whiteness, but a full sky. The poem becomes a landscape.
Maria Popova is the author, curator, and brain child behind the blog Brain Pickings: a cultural treasure trove of the thoughts, letters, and life’s work of some of history’s greatest thinkers. Most Brain Pickings articles have titles like “How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russel on What Makes a Fulfilling Life” and “Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair.” Spanning centuries, her articles delve into a person’s writing to find the fundamental truths that make them who they are.
Everything is heightened in a crisis. The way we interact with people changes. We become fiercely protective of those we love. We act selfishly or selflessly. Fear, grief, and loneliness become sharper, but so do those brief moments of joy, wonder, and connection.
Jeffrey Yang’s Hey, Marfa presents a multifaceted look at the tiny, West Texas town of Marfa, a self-referential art town that thrives on aesthetic and feeds philosophical thought. The poet uses dense nouns and verbs juxtaposed create a surplus of image-based poems, alongside the more historical, narrative-based pieces. Yang references the town’s focus on art in poems like “Thirteen Stations” when he describes the landscape as expressing “titanium white wisps / brushed raw sienna earth”, calling to mind the names for tubes of paint. Poems like “Circle” are wistful in tone.
Thousand Star Hotel, Bao Phi’s powerful second collection of poetry, wrestles with inheritance and lineage – the devastation of war, poverty, racism and the costs of masculinity. In the book’s opening poem, “Say What?,” Phi uses a repetition of the word “Ma” and the six different meanings in Vietnamese to conclude that “Vietnamese people have always been spoken word poets.
Poet Fatimah Asghar has written a substantial amount of striking and intimate work in her debut collection If They Come for Us. In this collection, Asghar digs into themes of national and personal identity, chronicling her development as a young immigrant into her teens and young adulthood in America. She relates a dissonance in her identity, the struggle to “Map Home” as she balances her people's history with her developing identity in America.
Although he’s had more than seven books (novels and story collections) published in Spanish, THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM is Bernardo Esquinca’s first collection in English. In a gorgeous bilingual edition, these stories introduce the English language reader to the strange, eerie world of Esquinca.
