Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa

By Sean McCoy

JULY/AUG 2023 | Poetry

Brandon Shimoda is a mystic poet. Hydra Medusa is an otherworldly book. By that I mean it is wholly of this world. The poems are small rituals that unmake and remake our world into something it actually resembles. This resemblance is not what you see; the feeling snakes into your entrails and refuses to leave. If you pick up one of his poems and turn it around in your hands, it will visit your dreams.

BRANDON HOBSON with Andrew Ervin

FEB 2021 | Books

I’m in awe of Hobson’s vision, his ability to guide his readers beyond the constraints of realism with grace and authority. And that’s perhaps what I love most about The Removed: the necessary reminder that the real and the extra-real are in fact the same thing; the distinctions we tend to make say more about ourselves than the world(s) in which we dwell.

Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans

By Henry Hicks IV

JUNE 2023 | Books

Brandon Taylor has a lot to say about truth. The characters in his new novel, The Late Americans, descend on Iowa City, home of the fabled University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program—an intentional setting for Taylor’s exploration of voyeurism, communication, and, yes, truth, in today’s America. In its opening, Taylor tosses the reader into a live workshop debate on the merits of poems that center trauma—its buried question being, “Whose voice is an authority? Whose experiences spur truth—yours or mine?”

Lit de Marcel

By Francis M. Naumann

APRIL 2022 | Books

For those interested in the private life of Marcel Duchamp, Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love and Art, might come as a welcomed contribution to the extant literature on the artist. Although we already knew something about this subject—thanks, in part, to the definitive biography on the artist by Calvin Tomkins (from which this book draws heavily)—this is the first time an author has carefully read the unpublished diaries of Duchamp’s two closest friends during his early years in New York.