A Ringing Echo: The Poetry of Caitlin Doyle
Caitlin Doyle’s poems are not always what they appear to be, and this subtle shape-shifting quality is exactly what makes them so revelatory. As poet and critic Abriana Jette has…
The Glam and the Gloom: Cynthia Cruz’s Wunderkammer
Cynthia Cruz is in the midst of producing an important body of work. Wunderkammer is as much installation art as it is a book of poems, or it is as…
Sources: Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile
In July, I travelled to Accra, Ghana for my sister’s engagement. Walking through my aunt’s one-story house, I searched the rooms for novelty and familiarity. So much had changed. Walls…
Text Within the Text: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
So I dismantled it. Mounted it and then dismantled it but its uncanniness its Nessie in Loch Ness-ness lurks and snuffles and sways. —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ledger 1 Rachel Blau DuPlessis’…
Settlement: Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl
It’s no accident that the hardcover design of Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl evokes Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House On The Prairie books. The font is large like a children’s book; the dust-jacket made…
A Reluctance to Cede Ground: Age and the Writing Life
“…so blow a kiss to this drowned world. The gods have spoken: yield.” —Maxine Kumin, “Going Down” In her introduction to A Story Larger Than My Own: Women Writers Look…
The Previous Everyday: Nicola Griffith’s Hild
In Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Naomi Schor explores the connection between detail and female identity in art and literature. Schor argues that detail can be threatening in its…
Where There is Dust, There is Hope
At the half-way point of Kenya’s hotly-contested 2007 elections, the challenger Raila Odinga seemed poised to unseat President Mwai Kibaki. Odinga championed a host of Kenyan tribes who felt underrepresented…
The Impassive Listener: Rusty Morrison
A chainlink is an apt image for the way concepts and objects become a single edifice, the way objects and meaning create boundary and enclosure, the way perception becomes partition…