Throughout The Garden Against Time, Laing returns to the concepts of gates and walls: while she sees the need for secrecy, or at least privacy, as having been crucial for the formation of what she calls a queer “counter-state” (213) in the face of oppression, she is well aware that borders and barriers to access are tools of oppression as well.
Author:
But I Knew: A Conversation with Charles Rammelkamp about See What I Mean?
See What I Mean? is a collection of persona poems and flash pieces that traverse American history, politics, and society through a matter-of-fact diction characteristic of the poetry of witness by Charles Reznikoff. Like Reznikoff’s poetry, Rammelkamp’s poems look at and document the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of race, gender, and class.
The Embodiment of Language in Carolina Hotchandani’s The Book Eaters
Just as her father grapples with the loss of language, the author’s children are in the process of acquiring it. Both experiences raise complex questions about the self: its definition, its boundaries, and how it is shaped by the words we inherit or create.
A review of membery by Preet Kaur Rajpal
It is a book that truly only she could write. Reading it makes you feel like you are getting a lens into her inner world, growing up as a young girl in an immigrant family, during 9/11 and the following years.
A review of How We Became Post-Liberal by Russell Blackford
Blackford’s knowledge is wide-reaching and he constructs his arguments carefully, with evidence that encompasses history, law, and philosophy, making it clear that the first step in combating intolerance is to understand how and why it arises.
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A review of Beyond the Shores by Tamara J Walker
A review of Heimlich Unheimlich by Hazel Smith and Sieglinde Karl-Spence
The short book is beautifully written and visually arresting, combining memoir, imagery, fiction, poetry, and the linking of two very different lives that meld and weave together like the names they give themselves – Hessian and Muslin.
A review of The Hand of Fate: a review of Unbound by Sinead McGuigan
Every story, every journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So with this fine book of poems. Its end is a reaching out. To whom? Herself, to other women, to humanity.
Boxed in to Today: A review of Apartmentalized by Dan Flore II
Paradoxically, the poet is at home and not at home, as alienated from himself as he is from his apartment and the complex of apartments in these poems. As a sequence they have a structure of irony. The poet’s self-conflict is expressed in his descriptions of neighbors and people who work at the complex.