I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

By Carissa Chesanek

SEPT 2020 | Books

Laura van den Berg’s latest short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, focuses on women trying to cope with whatever life brings them, which is usually something traumatic, sexist, and violent.

Walking: Foot as Conduit

By Brooke Williams

MAR 2020 | Critics Page

Is there a force coming up out of the earth that we absorb through our feet while walking? This question has been vapor, been a ghost, been there invisible throughout my walking life. We’d walked, following Richard Jefferies, the 19th-century nature-mystic who came here before, to White Horse Hill and standing above on a green hill that at that moment had been turned into an island, an ephemeral grey sea washing in around its base. Into the green turf carpeting White Horse Hill is cut the Uffington Horse. One hundred meters long, we walked slowly, mindfully from tail-tip to head, dropping between its ears, to stand in its table-like eye where for the first time real words condensed onto my tongue and I said them aloud. What Richard Jefferies knew he absorbed directly from the earth through the bottom of his feet as he walked.

Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body: Poems

By John Domini

JUNE 2020 | Books

Together, Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body: Poems go a long way towards providing this dark moment its definitive accompaniment. More astonishing still, the poets bring off triumphs distinctly different. You’d never mistake McSweeney’s heartbroken stammer for Griffiths’s blue wail, yet either outcry will set your back-hairs prickling. Either could wind up a prizewinner—though good luck choosing between them—and in any case the texts will go on providing their unique, adult consolations for whatever sorrows lie in wait.

They Don’t Want Us to Feel

By Marwa Helal

APR 2019 | Critics Page

The mind’s wet paint. Your ears tingle with knowing. Your scalp—it comes alive. The transfer is complete.