Posts Categorized: Microreviews

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Microreview: Claudia Cortese’s Wasp Queen

Wasp Queen by Claudia Cortese (Black Lawrence Press, 2017)

Lucy—Cortese’s recurring character, our “wasp queen”—permeates this collection with stingers and Barbie heads, gauze, shopping malls, cul-de-sacs, wisteria, Ohio, Oreos and Ring Pops, Rainbow Brite, mirrors, fire, swear words, period blood, milk teeth, “the popular girls,” dirt, chicken fingers, Cheetos, lawn elves, masturbation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dirty Dancing, ribbons, rot, and milkshakes. Through these repeated images, Cortese invites us fully into Lucy’s world, wants us to be her friend, to make pinky-promises and eat a caterpillar with her.

The poem titles immediately engage and set up Lucy’s escapades in Midwestern suburbia—with titles such as “What Lucy’s World Looks Like,” “Lucy Selfie,” “What Lucy’s World Smells Like,” “What The Girls Named Lucy/ What Lucy Named The Girls,” “Lucy tilts the mirror of the CoverGirl compact between her legs.” The cover image of a slit filled with swarming wasps implies a vagina, a peek inside Lucy’s world of girlhood, viscera, aliveness.

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Microreview: Allegra Hyde’s Of This New World

Of This New World by Allegra Hyde (University of Iowa Press, 2016)

At the end of “Free Love,” the third story in Allegra Hyde’s award-winning collection, the narrator, Almond, reflects on her lingering sense of alienation in her grandmother’s household: “But I still feel strung out, loose, like a fish on land, or a girl on the moon, or a flower no one recognizes taking root in an unexpected place” (39). This line encapsulates the ambivalent condition of the collection’s protagonists: They are unrecognizable flowers, girls on the moon, struggling to feel anchored as their quests for utopia falter.

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Microreview: Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)

Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees opens with a vivid depiction of Nigeria’s civil war through the eyes of coming-of-age protagonist Ijeoma. A child at the war’s beginning in 1967, Ijeoma is sent by her mother to live with a grammar-school teacher and his wife under the assumption she will be safer with them. The circumstances of this foster care arrangement are fairly grim, and yet Ijeoma’s relative good fortune is thrown into sharp relief through the images of warfare around her: decapitated bodies flanking streets, starving children with swollen bellies, a still-live boy rising in shock from a pile of corpses.

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Microreview: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib (Button Poetry, 2016)

I don’t want to imagine how many strangled nights Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib spent thrashing inside the belly of death to give us The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, but I am immensely grateful he survived them with a soul as expansive and rich as found in this debut collection of poetry. This collection carries a fierce duende, a juggernaut unafraid to tie your body “to a truck in east texas” and drag it “through that jagged metal holy land so you can meet god clean”. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is not so much a book you read, but one you survive—with Willis-Abdurraqib’s compassionate, elegiac lyric gently pushing you forward through heartbreak and violence.

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Microreview: Cori A. Winrock’s This Coalition of Bones

This Coalition of Bones by Cori A. Winrock (Kore Press, 2014)

When I read this collection, I was fascinated by the spine and its injuries. How perpetual pressure can force the spinal discs to wear away, how a rupture can seep into its surroundings—pinching nerves and birthing a relentless pain. Spinal discs are made to burden the daily compression and decompression caused by movement, but one instance of physical trauma or consistent strain can arrive at the same endpoint. This Coalition of Bones by Cori A. Winrock spoke to these themes, presented poems both compressing and decompressing in a motion filled with insistent musicality and unrelenting gentleness.

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