​Rogue Astronaut by Mitchell Jacobs is a collection of poems selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. It roughly follows the speaker’s father’s supposed alien abduction, the near fatal suicide attempt of the brother, and the speaker’s queer life with past lovers. The collection is themed around monsters and sci-fi such as The Thing, while also using religious imagery as the context for the speaker’s life. The language is exacting and humorous, seen most specifically in the poems, ‘Foreplay’, and ‘My Ex-Boyfriend Asks to Make a Silicone Replica So He Can Take Me with Him When He Moves Abroad’. Where in the former, “kneed” versus “need” are contemplated during an accidental bump during sex and the later for its premise and execution. Other poems that delighted me were ‘Mirror’, ‘Jesus Watches Me Get My Ass Swabbed’, ‘Ministration for the French Horn’, and ‘Hypnos’. Though, amongst all the humor, the speaker is dealing with his brother’s attempt at jumping off a building in ‘Apse with Stained Glass Triptych of the Crucifixion’. This poem has an interesting form, where the stanzas are squished into rectangles alongside three photos, effectively creating the feeling that the words written are coming through a phone screen. Quite an extraordinary read!
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​AGNI Issue 101 is a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and art mainly centered around conflict and the pain of war. There are pieces on Gaza and most notably the art feature of the issue is art done by a Palestinian artist. And the pieces I particularly liked were ‘Pandora Addresses the Court’ by Vanessa Stauffer, ‘Catching My Breath, I Nearly Forget the View’ by Jim Whiteside, ‘What I Can’t Say’ by Brandi Bird, and ‘Curly’ by Ahmed Douma. Though the piece that has stuck with me the most is ‘Florence, now a bird’ by Silja Liv Kelleris which is about a girl who begins growing wings. The government then takes her as a young girl and cages her up in the center of the town as a tourist attraction. After many years, they sew up her mouth and put a beak on her mouth. After a while, the government takes her out of the cage and makes her “fly” from the top of a building, which is really her plummeting to her death. Overall, a decent issue.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen is a poetry collection centering around queerness, love and family tension during and after Covid. The poems follow a speaker as he settles into his life with his partner, Jeff, while navigating teaching, his mother’s wariness and trepidation about his sexuality, all against the backdrop of the world falling apart. There are poems, such as, ‘One Year Later: A Letter’, which recognize the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, or of Covid being labeled the “Kung Flu” in ‘Winter [It’s April.]’. Though, my favorites of the collection were ‘Winter [Big smell]’, ‘Elegy While Listening to a Song I can’t Help But Start to Move to’, and ‘I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party’. The poems at times are funny—one referencing poop—while other times longing for the speaker’s mother to be okay with his partner, all while the world felt completely unsettled. Really enjoyed the read (and the cover is really cute too).
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Bestiary by Donika Kelly is a collection of love poems, sometimes about the author sometimes about her beloved, though always centered around mythology and creatures. Trauma from the father surfaces in poems such as in ‘How to be alone’, the author says, “The gusset of your panties / soaked with your father’s semen. Why / you no longer wear panties.” A sharply horrifying image, one that becomes really the only specifics of the father’s abuse that is referred to later on in the collection. Though, above and beyond, the collection has a bountiful of love directed at the speaker’s lover, such as in ‘Love Poem: Centaur’ which says, “I would make a burnishing / of you, by which I mean a field in flower, / by which I mean, a breaching—…Love, / I pound the earth for you. I pound the earth.” Other poems that drew my attention were ‘Tender’, ‘Little Box’, and ‘Love Letter’.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​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