At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word — “a person forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.” However, in Pamela Uschuk’s poetry collection Refugee, readers discover refugees of many kinds, not only refugees who fit the traditional definition but also those who redefine what it means to be a refugee. In Uschuk’s collection, refugees from racism seek shelter and justice in volatile environments, both human and animal refugees seek respite from climate change’s irreversible disasters, and those living with incurable diseases find the courage to continue pursuing a life amid the political, cultural, and environmental chaos each new day spent in astute observation of nature offers.
News & Review Type: Review
Southern Review of Books features Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE!
YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME Reviewed on NY Journal of Books!
“Weir writes beautifully, elegantly.”
The horrific AIDS epidemic inspired a flourishing of literature by writers more openly, proudly, often angrily, gay than their predecessors had been. These young writers had been surrounded by suffering and death from a devastating disease, accompanied by rejection from family and indifference from government and the medical establishment. John Weir’s 1989 novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a fictional chronicle of a young man who ultimately dies of AIDS, was wistful, witty, and ironic. Weir wrote one more novel, What I Did Wrong (2006). Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me is a collection of 11 stories, most of which have been published in literary magazines.
LARB Reviews Adam Kirsch’s THE DISCARDED LIFE!
ADAM KIRSCH’S FOURTH BOOK of poetry, The Discarded Life, is an autobiography in blank verse, organized into 40 numbered parts, like cantos, each averaging a comfortable 26 or 27 lines, which, if given titles, could probably stand on their own as individual poems. In sequence, they offer a detailed, moving, and exquisitely readable chronological journey through Kirsch’s Los Angeles upbringing, from the perspective of a writer who is, like Dante, nel mezzo del cammin, reckoning with the first half of his life.
Kirsch states his purpose in the opening section:
If now’s the time, before I age into
The wisdom or indifference of detachment,
To write down something of the way it happened,
It’s not because the circumstances matter,
But that the soul of meaning can’t survive
Outside the body of contingency.
The interesting paradox here is that the detritus of what Kirsch calls “a few old mementoes of the mind” is absorbing stuff, worthy of serving as the driving force behind the narrative, along with Kirsch’s sobering recognition that “[e]ventually the past begins to leak / The meanings that I took such pains to store there.” The Discarded Life functions as his alembic for distilling the past’s liquid fermentations, and also as the seasoned oak cask for preserving the condensations.
COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE reviewed in Life Elsewhere
Are Jigdesh and Charlie, the brilliantly depicted leads in Carlos Allende’s new novel, gay caricatures? The author’s answer may surprise you.
URSULA LAKE gets shout out in Poet Runner podcast!
Kim Dower’s I WORE THIS DRESS TODAY FOR YOU, MOM reviewed by The Washington Post!
Beware Kim Dower’s poetry. Again and again, this crafty writer invites you in for a casual chat and then wallops you. Her poem “Game Over” starts with a little comedy about squirting too much mustard on her hotdog; next thing you know, she’s wrestling with the existence of God.
PLAINCHANT reviewed in Publishers Weekly
URSULA LAKE reviewed in Five South!
URSULA LAKE reviewed in Midwest Book Review!
Kazim Ali’s NEW MOONS reviewed by World Literature Today!
In his introduction to New Moons, a collection of poetry, fiction, and lyrical memoirs by Muslims in North America, Kazim Ali confesses the difficulty of embarking on an anthology that seeks to represent collective Muslim identity.
YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME reviewed in Foreword Reviews!
THE SKIN OF MEANING reviewed in North of Oxford!
YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME reviewed in North of Oxford!
Kim Dower’s I WORE THIS DRESS TODAY FOR YOU, MOM reviewed in Shelf Awareness!
Kim Dower’s I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom finds the former City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood celebrating a colorful mosaic of mothering moments that range from the spiritual to the practical. This poetry collection also pays homage to the matriarchs in her life, including her Russian grandmother, and their different mothering styles.