Time and again, kato-kiriyama pushes the reader to continue their hard work to understand and enact her “pan-generational consciousness.” The arts activism to build community in ICON 6; the call to treat all humans with utmost empathy, always, in ICON 9’s N.T.S.; kato-kiriyama speaking aloud her queer identity to “the curious Uncle or Auntie” who doesn’t quite understand and ICON 10’s N.T.S. reminder that “I am a little crazy./This is very normal,” living this nontraditional life to confront, take action, and heal through her Japanese American Angeleño identity.
A review of Something So Precious by James Lee
Something So Precious is a novella that explores at once the thrill of youth, suffocation of legacy, the secrets families keep and the elusive nature of desire. Some of the prose would not seem out of place in a novel by Anaïs Nin, as it delves deftly into the intricacies of love affairs with both realism, poetic lyricism and philosophical musing. I mention Nin in particular because she was a visionary in femme erotica and Lee’s prose, for a male writer, not unlike Pedro Almodóvar’s films, touched me for its understanding of femme desire.
A review of With by Kenning JP Garcia
Is this a truly Copernican exploratory adventure in poetry then, or just another academic Ptolemy-ization of contemporary verse? The former, who believed in Earth-centered astronomy, famously endeavored to complicate the data so as to account for the anomalies that were fast gathering around him making undeniable the proof that he was wrong…pointing out the proverbial elephant in the room so to speak, the emperor’s new clothes: nakedness. JP Garcia exercises something of the scientists’ precision talent with their diary here.
A review of A Better Class of People by Robert Lopez
Here there is heartache and trauma and humanity. There is detachment and longing and grief. Maybe we need to expand the umbrella that covers a “better class” of people. Or maybe, our narrator is accurate when, early in the book, he asserts, “Everyone I know is horrible.”
A review of Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Cold Enough for Snow is a deeply beautiful novel, richly potent in its themes, while resisting simple explication. It reads quickly, driven forward by the tension between presence and absence, love and shame, caring and being cared for, past and present, belonging and otherness, while its meaning unfolds slowly, lingering.
A review of Ox in Metal by Jennifer Maiden
It’s as if there’s a dream-universe in which the characters continue to develop like a series—they meet and talk, referencing previous situations and combining those with what is happening in the real public and political spectrum. The effect is both stimulating and unsettling, as the characters are both representative and self-contained.
A review of Pretend I Don’t Exist by Morgan Bell
Pretend I Don’t Exist is a delight to read – the kind of book a parent can have a lot of fun reading to a child (or vice versa) but also one that tells a serious and important story about the beauty of animal sentience, the rich interplay of the human and the natural, animate world, and perhaps most importantly, the precariousness of the latter, particularly when it comes to koalas who are increasingly vulnerability, facing a significant and rapidly increasing loss of habitat.
A review of Off Limits by Louise Wakeling
Wakeling writes lines methodically, in a measured way, never letting her words race ahead of her intended message, whether she is writing about underground stormwater pipes, a power station or the underbelly of a secret Sydney. The poet filters ordinary experiences and places through vibrant images and poignant words.The poet brings to the front paradigms of life and the world, sometimes her observations are like theorems others like syllogisms and others like a work of art.
Tree Stumps Adorn Their Graves: A Conversation with Author Javier Sinay and Translator Robert Croll about The Murders of Moisés Ville
In The Murders of Moisés Ville, award-winning journalist Javier Sinay investigates a series of murders from the late nineteenth century, unearthing the complex history and legacy of Moisés Ville, the “Jerusalem of South America,” and his personal family connection to a little-known period of Jewish history in Argentina, linked to his great-grandfather Mijl Hacohen Sinay.
A review of Count Four: Poems by Keith Kopka
These speakers, Kopka’s tellers – their attitudes – interest me more than anything else. They seem to hurt, as if they live as emotionally bruised, successful failures whose memories of fathers and mothers, family, course the past coming in on the writer’s desire to tell all – and more – to live to play music so close to grieving, I want to wince then sigh for the horrific plight joy brings alive on the planet.