RaveShelf AwarenessTina Chang is the poet laureate of Brooklyn and, based on the content of her collection Hybrida, the title is well-deserved ... searing, often devastating ... Chang is never content to create a hundred stanzas out of a single idea. The book is a weaving of a hundred threads and motifs into a tapestry of poetic form. The poems here are restlessly, dizzyingly creative: they range from prose poetry to ekphrasis, all in the same lyrical and fierce voice. Sharon Olds or Margaret Atwood come to mind, but Chang is completely and utterly herself ... If at times the verse is so metaphorical as to be obtuse, Chang earns that with the sheer power of the emotions at play ... Overall this is a remarkable book by a poet who taps into the great Over-Soul, as Emerson would put it, and carries the anguish, the urgency she finds there and puts it to paper. This is one of the best poetry collections of 2019.
Jana Prikryl
PositiveShelf Awareness... a playful and melancholy reordering of everyday life in the metropolis ... arguably not for readers new to poetry; this is challenging work even perhaps for veteran bibliophiles, but that\'s a good thing. These are poems of urban spaces unstuck in time and known to few ... Prikryl gives the interested party a chance to explore them and experience something new. This is a book of ordinary moments turned into catastrophe, where leisurely walks down the streets become literally explosive. A superb feat of insight that shouldn\'t be missed by those with a taste for something bold.
Mario Levrero, Trans. by Annie McDermott
RaveShelf Awareness... charming, hilarious and often insightful ... Levrero\'s prose is often poetic and slightly winking throughout; he knows that his hero is a bit ridiculous but likes him regardless. (And translator Annie McDermott has done an impeccable job adapting him.) ... Levrero...shares the tendency of Borges and Lispector to reach epiphany through roundabouts and the gleeful embrace of the strange ... Hopefully this isn\'t the first and last of Levrero\'s works to be translated.
Brian Raftery
PositiveShelf Awareness... thoughtful and entertaining ... If there\'s a mournful quality to the epilogue on how much things have changed--such as Kirsten Dunst lamenting the decline in quality of modern movies--there\'s excitement, too: a film year like 1999 could happen again just as people have given up hope ... Ultimately Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is an engaging and brilliantly researched book on, as Raftery calls it, \'the most unruly, influential, and unrepentantly pleasurable film year of all time.\'
