Margaret Anne Kean’s chapbook, Cleaving the Clouds, is a record-keeping, an elegy, and a deep investigation of grief written in response to the loss of her parents, who passed away within a span of 27 days during the COVID pandemic. At the start, the poems remind me of my first...
I’m old now. It’s been many years since I first realized I was not like other people. That realization was rather shocking since we are raised to believe that everyone is pretty much the same, we’re cut from the same cloth, and we see the world in pretty much the...
“One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines,” Leslie Jamison writes. “We trade in the scripts we’ve written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.” This line appears in “The Real Smoke,” from her 2019 collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn. “The Real...
If “Songs of Seven Days” is your first poetic encounter with this writer, you might be forgiven if you’d quickly skimmed his bio (the words “Dominican friar” leap to the fore), glued that to the “Genesis/creation” theme of the book and assumed it was a stiff, albeit reverential, religious collection...
There’s a tender fragility and quiet strength woven into the words of each poem in Lucia Cherciu’s Immigrant Prodigal Daughter, as one might expect from such a vulnerable title. From Romania to New York, Cherciu reveals a heart divided into old and new worlds. This beautiful, moving book is presented...
Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories by Debasish Mishra (2022) is both touching and bittersweet. This book is not just a “collection” of disjointed short stories but rather a clever coordination that tie events and characters together. For example, Chottu and Raju, two childhood friends in the first story, “The...
By now, most readers of Anthony Veasna So’s 2021 Afterparties know he died of a drug overdose shortly before his debut collection went to press. His death, in some ways, has created a narrative of a writer taken too soon, and many reviews of his collection, in fact, focus on...
Lord Almighty, you can't take the country out of this boy (not that he himself hasn't tried). New Zealand-born, Texas-bred and California-beckoned Austin Leonard Jones has moseyed his way through all shades of lo-fi music, pop and otherwise, but on his latest album — Dead Calm (Perpetual Doom) — he fully commits to...
World, meet Evan Kertman. His debut album, Rancho Shalom (Perpetual Doom), invites the listener out onto the back patio to bask in his sun-dappled California country-folk glow. Chamber pop instrumentation charms and the clean West Coast-style production shimmers. Radio-ready tracks “Only The Birds” and “The Same Song” hint at jangle pop and psychedelia, respectively, but the...
I’ve been reading Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series at the rate of about one a year. This one is the sixth one. I guess I have another fourteen years to go before the thrilling conclusion! This one is concerned with politics in the early years of the Second Empire, when Napoleon’s dumbass...
