​New Ohio Review Issue 35 has a variety of interesting pieces, a part of which is a folio on how dance in poetry is an act of resistance, joy, and the taboo. Other parts of the issue expand on themes of pets, humor, and an essay comparing Darwin’s illness with the writer’s own Long COVID. Pieces I particularly liked were ‘The Smoker’ by Johnny Cate, ‘Carls’ by Craig Bernardini, ‘Spring Cleaning’ by Emma Wynn, ‘Strike a Blow for Liberty’ by Rose Lambert-Sluder, and ‘Thinking About My Father’s Erector Set from 1948’ by Jen Siranganian. For me, the highlight was the story by Craig Bernardini with how intensely humorous it was in referring to the Carls (as neighbors) and then their Carl (their son). The story follows the parents as they try to keep their son away from the neighbors because they know he’ll become indoctrinated by them and turn out badly. And its tone really worked for the narrative. Overall, the issue had very few misses, though not as many hits as I would’ve liked.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The Kenyon Review Fall 2023 is comprised of two main folios: a folio on and about food, while the other is about ‘Gender as a Vessel’. These two themes create a delightful issue in which stories about people being eaten in Douglas Silver’s ‘Taste’ are situation alongside discussions about the body being remade and changed. Other pieces I was fond of were ‘Lemon Season’ by Rebecca Ackermann, ‘Thunderhead’ by Gregory Spatz, and ‘Gulp’ by Dare Williams. I think my favorite—for how strange the story was—was ‘Taste’ in which a man’s hollandaise sauce was so good, it caused people to eat each other. A decent issue overall.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Blue Loop by AJ White is a collection of poems about addiction and recovery, the pain and struggles, and the transformative heat created by a star’s “blue loop”. White’s poems are like star clusters connected by strands of dark matter, where they reference, remix, and relive the moments the speaker drinks to excess—to addiction. And then, to being, “sober 8 weeks / for the first time in 8 years…” to then later go to rehab. One such instance, is the set of ‘Blue Loop’ poems which are centos of the other poems in the collection. For example, the line, “when you held my hand & loved me” from the first ‘Blue Loop’ is used in the last poem ‘I Was Here Before & Will Be Here Again’. This self-reference induces a type of reflection, a refrain that the speaker must tell themselves for them to understand and get through their addiction. Poems such as ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ applies this type of repetition though its use of language in stanzas such as, “The darkness floats, glacial, / on larger bodies of dark— // from conscious lacking directive / from tenderly / from tenderize / from break in / from bind”. That is to say the poems themselves feel like they have been caught in their own loops over time and space, pulsing from cool to hot back to cool. And as such, this whole collection burns with a type of heat that can be seen twinkling in our atmosphere from millions of miles away.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Paris Review Issue 135 is a collection of fiction, poetry, interviews, features, and art that is quite jam-packed with heavy-hitters. Though for the first half of the issue, nothing particularly stood out, except the interview with P.D. James—in a bad way. The interviewer, over the course of multiple questions, goads James into discussing feminism, eventually producing a very outdated understanding of the movement. James says, “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.” James is referring to how in a college she visited, there were posters up informing students about help-lines for harassment and date-rape, which she disliked. Now, over thirty years later, the same line about people being too “PC” is spouted from the mouths of actual fascists—or in the very least neoliberals who deride the left rather than the right. Regardless, the question stands: how does political correctness instill fascism? Is it how, as a society, we’ve agreed upon a set of words to describe people and that other words are deemed inappropriate? In that case, no one was stopping P.D. James from saying what she wanted. Sure, the consequences of James’s words could bite her back, but that would be expected with anything one is to say. This interview was a low point in the issue because the rest I quite enjoyed. There was quite a bit of poetry by Carl Philips that I liked. The interview with Thom Gunn was fascinating when he talked about the classics and his process. There’s a diary of taking a semester with Allen Ginsberg, which was insightful into Ginsberg as a poet and as a person. It was alluded in his talks and in the excerpts of Ginsberg’s past lovers, and the fanboys who lingered at the edge of his class. Though, for me the breakout piece was a story by Rick DeMarinis called ‘Experience’ about a 14-year-old boy who has a Ham radio set-up in his bedroom that’s in the basement, a step-father that wears a green pinstripe suit to every meal, and a friend whose cousin showed him her privates.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Paris Review Issue 235 is a collection of poetry, prose, interviews, art, and stage plays published essentially at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I found the interview with Edward Hirsch to be quite funny and also enlightening. There were other pieces that enjoyed such as ‘The Loss of Heaven’ by Dantiel W. Moniz, and “1976: A Lyric, A Memory, A Lie, The Absolute Truth” by Mary Crockett Hill. Though the stand out story for me was ‘River Crossing’ by Jack Livings which is about this town that’s centered around trying to cross the river to another encampment that’s far livelier. However, the river is infested with killer hippos and alligators such that it’s almost impossible to cross. There’s lore about the town building billboards on the river to signal to the other side, and the main industry of the town is an idea generation of how to cross the river. There are also people who decide to trek to outposts higher up the river that takes multiple lifetimes to get word back about what’s going on up north. Essentially this town’s strangeness and customs surround the desire to cross the river. So one day when the narrator’s daughter wants to become one of the people trekking northward, the narrator and his wife freak out. They try to convince their daughter to stay, but she’s unwilling to change her mind. Eventually the wife asks to join the trek. But before they can do anything, the narrator decides to go to his brother who was hiding a possible way across the river: a mechanical hippo. The story ends with the narrator starting his crossing. It’s a strange story and reminds me of another story called ‘The Sleep’ by Caitlin Horrocks which involves a whole strange town. Overall, I found this issue quite delightful.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​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

​I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a collection of poems in which the speaker documents his stroke, his time in the hospital, and his reflections on family and life. The language is sharp and cutting, and because they’re all prose poems, it is the language that holds each one up. There were so many poems I was affected by that I would just be listing off the table of contents if I were to say which ones I liked. However, there was one poem that I reread because of how piercing it is. This poem is, ‘Redshift’, in which the speaker describes a house being on fire for six years, and a man beating his wife, “…all night, the same night…” It highlights how trauma can be unseen, its recurrence, and that no matter where you stand, there will always be pain somewhere. In one of my favorite lines of the collection, the speaker observes, “When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and / everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.” What exists consumes and what consumes cannot be avoided. The collection is deeply haunting in how the speaker is frank about his family, his past lovers, and the stroke that invariably changed his world. An essential read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​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

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​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