RavePloughsharesA stark and powerful indictment of the innumerable ways that we are undone, individually and collectively, by ambition ... Catton navigates us through this labyrinth with deftly shifting points of view and compelling arcs of exposition—all the while preserving the tale’s jeremiadic invective and unflinching critique ... Birnam Wood’s conclusion, Shakespearian in its sound and fury, is similarly jarring in both extremity and absolutism. Catton’s stylish prose notwithstanding, the novel is relentlessly bleak.
Nazlı Koca
PositivePloughsharesA frenetic tear through a cosmopolitan world of all-night techno and ketamine-fueled encounters ... With its clipped, direct sentences and its abundance of resonant questions, long and short, Koca’s prose mirrors this narrative doubleness—giving readers an experience that is both irresistibly consumable yet compellingly durable.
Ada Limón
RavePloughsharesLimón affords constant dignity to those whose fragilities are too often framed as liabilities, those who can’t (or won’t) avoid the incessant constellating of experience and memory ... The Hurting Kind carves space for those who accept their role as witness ... The Hurting Kind refuses numb detachment or an easy forgetting.
Threa Almontaser
RavePloughshares... a vast and celebratory exploration of language, family, and diasporic identity ... The price of diaspora is always a certain kind of exile, but The Wild Fox of Yemen espouses neither sentimental nostalgia nor doomed isolation. Carefully rendered and expertly voiced, it asserts both the contradictions and the inherent dignity of its chosen subjects with equal force and insistence. These poems overflow with an abundance of life—poignant and melancholic, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, and always filled with beauty.
Sherwin Bitsui
PositivePloughsharesA brilliant and timely collection ... refuses either aesthetic alienation or nihilistic dread. Rather, their accumulation produces an opposite effect, drawing readers toward both the work’s affective core and its material conditions alike ... particularly remarkable in its portrayal and philosophy of the natural world.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
RavePloughshares\" ... Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular \'hum\' everywhere ... A review of Oceanic would be incomplete without brief mention of Nezhukumatathil’s deft touch with various poetic forms, from the haibun to the ghazal ... This is an important work, both for its poetic merits and for its incisive capture of the increasingly precarious nature of life, both human and nonhuman, on this planet.\
