Posts Tagged: Review

Review – Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth

Reviewed by Laura Dzubay

One of the most biting struggles of raising children in Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth comes in very small, human moments of perceived disrespect. If your son kicks the back of your seat while you’re driving, is it because he doesn’t respect you enough to listen when you tell him to stop, or is he just forgetting because he’s a kid? If he doesn’t come when you call, is he actively choosing not to listen, and to create more work for you by not listening, or did he just not hear?

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Review – Aimee Nez’s World of Wonders

Reviewed by Alberto Sveum

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s debut book of essays is an enchanting meeting of a reflective, lyrical study of the Earth, and the author’s personal history and her awe for the natural world.

From conversing with cardinals in the Midwest to laughing along with bonnet macaques in southern India, Nezhukumatathil has found joy in the beings of the world since early childhood. These celebratory moments—looking for birds with her two young sons, watching the fireflies at the Great Smoky Mountains—bring forth so much light. However, such celebration, such wonder, is also met with some of the darker parts of existence and questions of how humans treat this shared habitat and one another. “Where does one start to take care of these living things amid the dire and daily news of climate change?” she asks. “How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day?” Perhaps it is this childlike wonder itself that can show us how to better treat one another and to revere and protect our planet. Even while encountering a nationalist school teacher and seeing the racism her Filipino mother has gone through in her own life and career, the author finds direction in studying the fireflies, the dragon fruits, and the vampire squids surrounding her and the love with which they fill her. It is only right that the enrapturing beauty of the world is brought into focus by Nezhukumatathil’s lyricism and coupled with Fumi Nakamura’s vibrant and beautiful illustrations.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments is a triumph of poetic study and a profound display of care.

Milkweed Editions, Sept. 8, 2020, $25.00 hardcover (184p), ISBN: 978-1-57131-365-2.

Alberto Sveum is an MFA graduate from Indiana University Bloomington, where he also served as the Editor-in-Chief of Indiana Review. Lately, he’s been listening to The Pharcyde and Mazzy Star, watching What We Do in the Shadows, and trying to get outside every day.

Review – Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country

Reviewed by Laura Dzubay

There are some moments that are so wrought with potential, they exist for eternity. In Infinite Country, Patricia Engel travels through and between these moments as they’re experienced by the five members of a family divided between Colombia and America, carefully uncovering the details of their lives one era at a time and guiding the reader through the overlapping stories and mythologies that have led them to the present moment.

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Review – Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, by Michelle Nijhuis

Reviewed by Laura Dzubay

In a late chapter in Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, Michelle Nijhuis shares a quote from legal scholar Holly Doremus: “Nature advocates have obtained much of what they have asked for, but they have not asked for what they really want.” The climate crisis has recently begun taking its long overdue place in the spotlight of international concern, and in that context, Doremus’s observation highlights something crucial: that we only have so much time to choose the future we want.

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MICROREVIEW: David B. Goldstein’s Object Permanence

Review by Hannah Thompson

On the last numbered page of Object Permanence, David B. Goldstein reveals the occasion for this chapbook—while staying at Casa da Confraria in Sinatra Portugal, he wrote poems from the perspective of dolls and animals he encountered in the house. Goldstein names the dolls by identifying their anachronistic, and often unsettling, features. Here are just a few of the titles: “Large Head Under Glass,” “Handless and Legless Doll,” “Burning Doll,” and “Big-Handed Doll.” Regardless of our cultural fear of dolls (their fixed expressions, their hollow bodies, their uncanny-valleyness), these titles are scary. Who removed the Large Head from the doll’s body and put it under the glass? Who tore the hands and legs from the Handless and Legless Doll? Why is the Burning Doll burning? And, furthermore, who does the Big-Handed Doll address when it says, “Each of you must decide / how I will hurt you,” (1-2)? I won’t answer these questions for you. Instead, I ask you hold onto your uneasiness as you approach the two most difficult poems in this piece.

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