Category: microreviews & interviews
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microreview: Cenote City by Monique Quintana
review by José Angel Araguz Monique Quintana’s debut novel, Cenote City (Clash Books), is a stellar addition to the Latinx storytelling tradition of texts born out of exploring the intersections where folklore, politics, cultura, and literature meet. Told through fable-like short chapters, Cenote City presents the story of Lune whose mother, Marcrina, cannot stop crying to…
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microreview: Slingshot by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
review by José Angel Araguz There’s a moment toward the end of the sequence “a machine of mahogany and bronze I” in Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s debut poetry collection Slingshot (Nightboat Books) where, in the aftermath of a protest demonstration broken up by police brutality, the speaker is asked “You heard about the storm comin’?” which prompts…
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microreview & interview: Real Daughter by Lynn Otto
review by José Angel Araguz It seems simple to say that what words can point to and hold is a constant source of meditation for me and other poets. Yet, this type of meditation is a high stakes one as it is in contemplating what words can hold that one also necessarily reckons with what…
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microreview & interview: Zarzamora by Vincent Cooper
review by José Angel Araguz Vincent Cooper’s Zarzamora: Poetry of Survival (Jade Publishing, 2019) is a collection grounded in the great traditions of Chicano poetry. These poems recall the immersive narratives of Jimmy Santiago Baca and Luis J. Rodriguez along with the image-driven lyricism of Gary Soto’s early work. What sets Cooper’s work apart is the distinct…
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microreview & interview: Zoom by Susan Lewis
review by José Angel Araguz In a recent conversation about prose poetry, I found myself tasked with defining what makes a prose poem “poetry” exactly. I fell back on my usual starting point, some riffing on Charles Simic’s idea shared in an interview that “[what] makes them poems is that they are self- contained, and…
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microreview & interview: Stonelight by Sarah McCartt-Jackson
review by José Angel Araguz In Stonelight, winner of the 2017 Airlie Prize, Sarah McCartt-Jackson adds to the tradition of lyric narrative collections that includes Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, books that take on the materials of human life and through them evoke human presence. Informed by McCartt-Jackson’s background in folk…
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microreview & interview: Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret
review by José Angel Araguz The First Time PCOS Spoke – Minadora Macheret The doctor didn’t believe my periods had disappeared. Most months were painless as I watched all the other girls clutch cramps and bloating— I wanted that too. I was different enough and every 28 days I begged my uterus. Medicine wrestles pubescent…
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microreview & interview: Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez
review by José Angel Araguz The Latinx experience is often reduced to ideas of duality. There’s the phrase “ni de aqui, ni de allá” (neither from here nor from there). There’s Gustavo Peréz Firmat’s idea of “living on the hyphen,” which acknowledges the duality of having a hyphpenated identity, in his case Cuban-American. Even one…
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microreview & interview: House of McQueen by Valerie Wallace
review by José Angel Araguz In the note for “Let’s make a dress from these,” from Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen (Four Way Books), we learn that the poem’s title is a quote from Alexander McQueen himself, spoken “as he walked into his workroom with a handful of red medical slides.” In the same spirit of…
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microreview & interview: Phantom Tongue by Steven Sanchez
review by José Angel Araguz Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications) by Steven Sanchez begins with “On the Seventh Day,” a poem depicting the speaker poring over images of male models in the Sunday ads—”glossy men” that “look like my G.I. Joe / if his clothes weren’t painted on”—then cutting and pasting body parts, fashioning ideal versions…
The Friday Influence 