This Week’s Reviews

Black Forest
Valérie Mréjen, trans. Katie Shireen Assef | Deep Vellum Publishing | 9781944700904 | October 2019
“In seventy-two pages (including translator’s note), Mréjen stalks no less than great Death itself, in all its various tragic or capricious or mundane or shocking or brutal or funny guises.”—Three Percent

Sphinx
Anne Garréta, trans. Emma Ramadan | Deep Vellum Publishing | 9781941920091 | April 2015
“Verve, loss, mourning, death. All in a moment which come upon us. Perhaps we wouldn’t talk so much about this book if not for its feats. But its narrator driven to give tangibility and record to memory, too leaves a lasting image.”—More Bedside Books

Stunt
Michael DeForge | Koyama Press | 9781927668696 | September 2019
Stunt will feel confusing and mysterious like much of the rest of his work. But never has DeForge’s work felt so honest or so connected. Never has it been so heartbreaking.”—Solrad

Race Man: Selected Works 1960-2015
Julian Bond, edit. Michael G. Long | City Lights Publishers | 9780872867949 | February 2020
“As the nation confronts another period of ethnic and racial backlash and upheaval, Michael G. Long has edited a wonderful collection of Bond’s own words. . . . Bond’s life of activism and service . . . offers a powerful example of servant leadership that could serve as a roadmap for Americans today.”—Chapter 16

Meat & Bone
Kat Verhoeven | Conundrum Press | 9781772620337 | May 2019

“Kat confronts her own struggles and polyamourous leanings in a fictional reality with an ensemble of fully realized and diverse characters that has never been seen to this degree in comics before and will stick with you.”—Speech and Bubble

Plummet
Sherwin Tija | Conundrum Press | 9781772620405 | October 2019
“It’s the clarity of the book’s accessible cartooning style in bringing the concept of a world in descent to life that impresses equally as much as its more overt themes.”—Broken Frontier

In Praise of Fragments
Meena Alexander | Nightboat Books | 9781643620121 | February 2020
“Alexander’s last work is a lesson in impermanence, transcendence, and the beauty and futility of trying to capture meaning in two hands and two eyes. Her fragments are time immemorial.”—Vagabond City

Witch Wife
Kiki Petrosino | Sarabande Books | 9781946448033 | December 2017
“In Petrosino’s poems about reluctance to become a mother, readers discover something new and remarkable: a quandary whispered about but not often publicly discussed. . . . What Petrosino demonstrates in Witch Wife is that an increased self-awareness begins with the very prospect of parenthood as a woman seesaws between distinguishing what she wants for her future from that which is socially accepted or expected.”—West Branch

Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era
Chad Bennett | Sarabande Books | 9781946448484 | January 2020

“At once daring, humorous, and tender, these poems show the mind at work exploring what it means to live in the body, to desire and be desired.”—American Literary Review

Jakarta
Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, trans. Thomas Bunstead | Coffee House Press | 9781566895637 | November 2019
“Tizano’s distinctive style and his boundless imagination are a thrill to read.”—Locus Magazine

Alisoun Sings
Caroline Bergvall | Nightboat Books | 9781643620015 | November 2019
“There’s something echt modernist about Caroline Bergvall’s longterm project of turning over, repurposing, and generally fucking around with the western canon. . . . Bergvall’s Alisoun has the linguistic panache, the historical learning, and the theoretical chops not merely to rehearse a thousand years of oppression and resistance, but to offer in the poem’s final passages an infectiously uplifting — even for the cynical — call to arms.”—Hyperallergic

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