​Black Warrior Review Issue 52.1 is a collection of poetry, essays, fiction, and comics. The fiction in particular displayed the monstrous, the strange, and the surreal while the poetry interrogated the political. The pieces I enjoyed were ‘Four Teachers Stapled Together’ by Brett Hymel Jr., ‘Bring us to the Egalitary, Bring us to the End’ by Rishona Michael, ‘Dear Property Owner’ by Renata Golden, and ‘How to Catch and Cook a Mermaid’ by M. Lea Gray. One of my own stories is featured in this issue, but it was a delight to read such brave works of art.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​American Short Fiction Issue 82 is a collection of six short stories all revolving around relationships in turmoil or that fizzle out. ‘When We Go, We Go Downstream’ by Carrie R. Moore is about this brother and sister whose family has said to be cursed and that all relationships end afoul. It’s set in the days before the sister’s wedding where the brother has brought along a new date and problems arise when the sister’s partner goes missing. The brother soon realizes the curse is real and thus cuts off his own relationship. ‘Archer’s Paradox’ by KJ Nakazawa-Kern is about a man who has started dating a woman after a divorce and takes up archery in his house to start coping with it. Though, I think the most interesting story was ‘The Skilled Anatomist’ by Colleen Rosenfeld in which a woman’s friend is attempting to get over the grief of losing her family by getting procedures done by anatomists to be where the grief goes. Eventually none of the procedures work, so the woman is asked to become pregnant with a baby and her friend’s grief.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran is a collection of poems in which the speaker contends, contextualizes, and survives a sexual assault. Its poems draw from Vietnamese folklore, the Buddha, and the speaker’s lineage from Vietnam. There is an intensity that comes through in the poems, ‘Incident Report’, ‘Chrome’, ‘The First Law of Motion’, ‘Lipstick Elegy’, and ‘The Santa Ana’. Its lines were haunting though powerful in describing the assault and the aftereffects, specifically when marking things down in the incident report.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is a novel about a man who’s about to die, but is able to make a bargain with the devil to stay alive. For everything the speaker decides to disappear, the devil will give him another day of life. Initially, the speaker thinks this an easy thing, so agrees. The first day phones are disappeared which causes the speaker to reflect on his old love whom he spoke with over the phone for hours at a time. The same day, he meets his old love to say goodbye. This is when she invites him to a movie date the following day. When he returns, the devil is there to suggest to disappear movies. Movies are a little harder for the speaker to give up, but after a visit to an old movie buff and then watching a screen display just white, the speaker becomes ready. On the third day, the speaker agrees to losing clocks, which had been his father’s primary line of work. And when on the next day the devil suggests to disappear cats, it takes a whole day for the speaker to make a decision. He remembers life with his current cat and the cat before in the context of his mother who died years before. In the end, he decides other people’s life would be worse if cats didn’t exist, so refuses. Knowing he’s on a tight timeline, the speaker writes down everything that has happened and intends to mail it to his father whom he hadn’t spoken to in years over the mother’s death. The novel ends with the speaker on his bike arriving at the father’s doorstep.
 
Kawamura creates a whimsical story where the devil is the speaker’s doppelgänger dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Cabbage the cat can speak. The speaker’s relationship with his father is never really front and center until the last portion, but it seems that the story revolves around him reconnecting with his father. A fun read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Battalion Shaped Girl by Temperance Aghamohammadi is a poetry collection imbued with the sense of the ephemeral. The collection feels like a meditation, on womanhood, on being trans, and on the violence our bodies are employed to withstand. I was particularly drawn in by the poems, ‘There are no Sound Machines’, ‘Did You Want to Come In?’, and ‘Fetish III’. Syntactically, the poems are mostly constructed from phrases cut through with periods which provide the feeling of only making out a glance of the subject. Never quite able to capture all of it in one thought. A delight to read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela is a novel about a man, Andy, who’s marriage with his husband, Marco, is in a rocky patch. Instead of joining Marco on his work trip, Andy decides to return home to care for his father and go to his 20-year high school reunion. As Andy joins the reunion party at a local bar, there are two people from his past he is not ready to see: Paul, a man who had killed a gay man, and Jeremy, Andy’s high school love. This kicks off a tensioned bout with Paul in the intervening weeks where Andy confronts him about the death in Paul’s church, and finally Paul taking Andy to the spot of the beating to confess. While the meeting with Jeremy, who already had a wife and kids, kick starts an affair that seems to pick up where they left off right before they were going to run away together. Among all of this, Andy visits his high school friend, Simone, who turns out to have Schizophrenia and is in a mental health facility. He talks with her about his older brother’s death, his affair, and politics. Eventually, months pass and Andy’s father dies, so he returns home to care for his mother and visit Simone. And while Jeremy confessed his love, Andy knows and says the better choice is Marco.
 
Varela constructed the novel in a way that felt expansive and fulsome. We got an understanding of Andy’s parents and how they raised Andy and his brother. There was a chapter that focused on Simone’s father and his medical condition which informed Simone’s moments. While also following Andy’s brother and the troubles he had in life. However, because the novel spanned so many people and relationships, there were moments that felt like they were deviating from the main themes of the novel (i.e. Andy and Marco’s infidelity and what that meant for their marriage, and Henry’s death as it reverberated through Andy’s life). And while I thought Simone’s father’s moments made sense, they felt somewhat tangential to those central ideas. Additionally, the way the novel dealt with time sometimes felt disorienting. This was the main case for the last chapter which didn’t give much ceremony from Andy’s last visit to him visiting after his father’s death. And I initially thought the reunion would have a much stronger driving force (My personal writing instinct, I think, would be to use it not just for us to meet Paul/Jeremy, but to have the events of the reunion chart out Andy’s return in a more chronological way). Though, I felt it gave an amazing portrait of how queer folks deal with small towns, how the death of a brother influences and complicates life, and where family fits inside all of it.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Show Me Where the Hurt Is by Hayden Casey is a collection of short stories which border on the strange while always staying true to its central emotions. There’s a woman who begins to grow limbs from her lover in ‘Pretty Things’, a woman trying to deal with her brother’s death while her roommate becomes a yoga instructor inspired by his mother in ‘Hot Yoga’, a man who becomes obsessed with his girlfriend’s short stories in ‘Evergreen’, and (a personal favorite of mine due to editing it for Passengers Journal) a man who returns to his family where the cloud of their grandfather’s death by headache hovers over the man’s brother in ‘Headache’. The stories employ strangeness to amplify or make physical the feelings developing. For example, ‘Pretty Things’ uses the physical growth of a person’s limbs onto another as a way to show attachment. While in ‘Headache’ the brother’s anxiety latches onto their father’s brain cancer as a way to detach from the world. Other stories have a woman losing her shadow, and a woman taking diet pills which may or may not be addictive. A fun and surreal read!
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Exhibit by R.O. Kwon is a novel about Jin, a photographer, who one night at a party with her husband, Philip, meets Lidija, a ballet dancer on hiatus, and starts an affair. Jin and Lidija have a fiery relationship, one adorned in BDSM and secrecy, though it becomes increasingly tough for Jin to hide her relationship from Philip. Jin opens up to Lidija about a curse on her family in which a couple kills themselves over their forbidden love. All this comes to a head when Jin’s mother falls from a hiking trip in Seoul, hits her head, and is hospitalized. Jin flies to take care of her family, where it is eventually revealed she’s been having an affair with Lidija after Philip finds photos of Lidija. Philip is at first astounded, but then comes to terms with Jin, only asking her to stay with him if they can still have kids. Jin is apprehensive over this fact, instead dipping headlong back into her art.
 
Kwon’s writing style is the most unique part of this novel. It’s filled with sharp, compact, and dense sentences that read closer to poetry rather than regular prose. I also found the kisaeng’s story, which is infused within the narrative, added an almost mythological aspect to the novel. Mostly I enjoyed its play with language and the vividness of the scenes it evoked.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is a novel about a poetry professor who, one day doubles over in pain and is eventually taken to the hospital by his partner, L. The pain is initially a mystery where many doctors and nurses prod and test him, as he spends his first few days in the ICU. He later learns that the pain was from a nearly ruptured artery in the aorta, and that the mortality rate of not being treated for five days had been seventy-five percent. The follows the speaker through the tedium of being a patient in the hospital, his life in Iowa where a tree fell on their roof in a recent storm, and the mulling over of poetry. He has a few close calls when his blood pressure rises and feels the excruciating pain, but eventually the doctors find that he’s gotten better. So, he’s brought home where he becomes extra appreciative of his life.
 
The novel starts out with loads of anxiety, in which the question of what the pain was or how it came about, but soon fills the space with the slowness and minute details of hospital life. It works for this novel because that initial disorientation doesn’t continue, though at times it felt like that slowness sometimes worked against it. The speaker and L also had bought an old house that worked a practical and physical metaphor for the speaker’s body when the tree came crashing down on the roof. I enjoyed it on the whole, but did feel it drag in the middle.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Wickedest by Caleb Femi is a collection of poems which follows the happenings of a house party in south London in one night. I particularly liked the poems ‘Pass the Aux’, ‘Fredrick Stick Talks in Another Dimension’, ‘myth says South London boys don’t dance’, and ‘Brenda gives a pep talk to Abu’. The poems exude an energy of the house party, throwing away the idea of responsibility, and letting loose. Though, near the end, there’s a solemnness to the collection where Femi writes, “The stubborn weight of our giggling skulls/painted in your years./Remember us well.” A firecracker of a collection.
 
Final Rating: 4/5