She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...
Reviewed by Lucian Childs William di Canzio, Alec (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 352 pp., $27.00 US. I’m a sucker for gay love stories. They’re a sensuous, sugary hit of pure emotion. William di Canzio’s Alec is not without problems—like its source material, E. M. Forster’s posthumously...
Your chef will be the first to saynot a muster of hair should remainas he timbers a fire, wide hands barb your fattened flesh. Thigh all manner of birds; you’re as light as a featherthick as a board. Resentful caretakersbreak their deer, unlacelegs, loosen fleshcleanly from each side of bone...
“Fragmentary,” “broken” (Crazy from Swedish Krasa: to CRUSH), and a medley of narratives insisting on disconnect, either from the body, from the self, from language, or whatever apparatus needed to withhold the linear. I say it’s the opposite. If you’ve never been through it, you’re thinking of it...
The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...
Reviewed by Namitha Rathinappillai Nisha Patel, Coconut (NeWest Press, 2021), 108 pp., $19.95. Nisha Patel’s poetry debut, Coconut, reflects on the multifaceted experiences of queerness, race, womanhood, fatphobia, and familial relationships. The collection contains moments of both introspection...
