reviewing innovative new literature for The Contemporary Small Press:
Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (review for The Northern Review) – Building on a British history of overt racial exploitation and violence, Eddo-Lodge explains how structural racism still perpetuates racial inequality within society today.
Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz – Increasingly intense and immersive, Die, My Love explores the violence of human relationships that include sex, marriage, motherhood and filial responsibility.
Toward Passion According by Jazmine Linklater – A feminist re-working of the lyric/epic traditions that begins with the injunction to ‘Remember you are elsewhere’.
Liberating the Canon ed. Isabel Waidner – A deeply visceral rallying cry for innovative literature at the intersections.
The Magic Door by Chris Torrance – Openness is key to this collection, both in terms of poetic form and in the spirit of incompletion and enquiry that drives it.
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre – As unputdownable as it is unforgettable.
The Practical Senior Teacher by Finella and Philip Davenport – Its magic is in its perpetual openness to recreation, coming alive at its multiple points of connection.
Common Rest by Holly Pester – A poetry project tangible and alive with shapes and shades and weathers.
HOMMAGE A GUY by Bruno Neiva – The book, and the installation, become a poetic meditation on Debord’s words, layered in fragments which in turn compose a kind of open (w)hole.
Attrib. by Eley Williams – Attrib., Eley Williams’ debut short story collection delights in the deliciousness of words.
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams – It’s a consummate skill to be able to produce this sort of resistance in a reader.
Dodge and Burn by Seraphina Madsen– Longlisted for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize 2017, this is a magical-realist psychedelic road-trip novel with a strong and unconventional narrative voice.
The Secret of Good Posture by Paul Hawkins & Bruno Neiva – This text generates multiple semantic possibilities with the ways that it brings words into unexpected associations with one another and with the various other iterations of the pamphlet text.
Dogwood by Lindsay Parnell – Of all the manifest achievements of Dogwood – and there are so many – the most lasting, for me, are the ways in which it inscribes the feminine body in such agonizingly sensitive ways.
Sally-Shakti Willow 