RaveThe RumpusOf the many thematic throughlines that surface from Cunningham’s masterful prose, perhaps the most salient is the duality of politics and religion ... Cunningham’s novel is most compelling in the moments that dramatize that alchemy, the senator’s lineless skin peeled back to reveal gristle ... Deft.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe RumpusCarney’s world is rendered in almost luxuriant, comedic detail, one of Whitehead’s greatest talents. There is evidence of exuberant play on every page ... Labrynthine.
Ocean Vuong
RaveLIBER... a capacious collection of poems, containing many voices which together create a bold and thrilling departure ... Instances of wit and levity are a formal maneuver, gasps of relief interrupting stretches of emotional intensity. But they also signal a shift, a declaration on the part of Vuong. To those who understand him as the sad, gay Vietnamese American poet who writes sad, gay Vietnamese American poems: \'you don’t know me at all\'. This refusal is accomplished in part by the sheer variety of the collection ... To be sure, there are ghosts in these poems. But there is also a capacity for play. Alternating between these tones—sometimes in the space of the line—is itself a contemporary gesture, mimetic of how we scan without pause from news of ongoing police violence (one poem in the collection is dedicated to Tamir Rice) to memes about Pete Davidson, just as we achieve glimpses of beauty amid a seemingly impenetrable miasma. In Vuong, these somber moments bask in levity’s afterglow, allowing him renewed energy to break our hearts in all the ways he knows how ... Beyond sheer beauty, these poems delight in the harrowing middle, the lewd joke at the funeral—what we crawl toward and what keeps us crawling.
