Book Reviews | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Book Reviews | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Tom Williams’ “Among the Wild Mulattos” Reviewed by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Among the Wild Mulattos isn’t simply a book about biracial identity: it's also a look into the subtleties of difference, and it masterfully charts personal landscapes with humor, empathy, and wonder.
Marina Zurkow’s “The Petroleum Manga” Reviewed by Michael McLane
A catalog of petrochemicals assessed and personalized by nearly three dozen writers might seem like an unlikely theme to center a collection around, but this is exactly what Marina Zurkow curates in her unnerving and eerily charming project, The Petroleum Manga.
Ander Monson’s “Letter to a Future Lover” Reviewed by Kelly Lydick
An odyssey of linguistic complexity, your book, Letter to a Future Lover, appears to me as part catalog of experience, part treatise, and part question, a compendium of letters and errata, proof that we read and write to understand life.
Melanie Jordan’s “Hallelujah for the Ghosties” Reviewed by Barbara Duffey
Through multiple readings, I come back to continued ambiguities that refuse to reconcile themselves, and that’s the paradox at the heart of Jordan's poetic project: a system of “personal abstractions” that are emotionally poignant, intellectually complex, and physically and sonically beautiful.
Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came, reviewed by Jeff T. Johnson
"the world we have is not the world we want and these books know that, even while they also know love and communion even if the commune is always always fleeting."
Brian Henry’s Static & Snow, reviewed by Laura Carter
"[With] terse lines and images of severe desolation that compel it forward, Henry sings a song that is deeply moving.... I think this may be what he was after, but it’s impossible to know entirely. Unless one backs away from the snow, entirely. Or does something to subvert it, as he has done here, and done well."
Tom Williams’ “Among the Wild Mulattos” Reviewed by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Among the Wild Mulattos isn’t simply a book about biracial identity: it's also a look into the subtleties of difference, and it masterfully charts personal landscapes with humor, empathy, and wonder.
Marina Zurkow’s “The Petroleum Manga” Reviewed by Michael McLane
A catalog of petrochemicals assessed and personalized by nearly three dozen writers might seem like an unlikely theme to center a collection around, but this is exactly what Marina Zurkow curates in her unnerving and eerily charming project, The Petroleum Manga.
Ander Monson’s “Letter to a Future Lover” Reviewed by Kelly Lydick
An odyssey of linguistic complexity, your book, Letter to a Future Lover, appears to me as part catalog of experience, part treatise, and part question, a compendium of letters and errata, proof that we read and write to understand life.
Melanie Jordan’s “Hallelujah for the Ghosties” Reviewed by Barbara Duffey
Through multiple readings, I come back to continued ambiguities that refuse to reconcile themselves, and that’s the paradox at the heart of Jordan's poetic project: a system of “personal abstractions” that are emotionally poignant, intellectually complex, and physically and sonically beautiful.
Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came, reviewed by Jeff T. Johnson
"the world we have is not the world we want and these books know that, even while they also know love and communion even if the commune is always always fleeting."
Brian Henry’s Static & Snow, reviewed by Laura Carter
"[With] terse lines and images of severe desolation that compel it forward, Henry sings a song that is deeply moving.... I think this may be what he was after, but it’s impossible to know entirely. Unless one backs away from the snow, entirely. Or does something to subvert it, as he has done here, and done well."