RaveOn the Seawall... a collection of poems entangled with pervasive sorrow ... Amid the gradual ravages of time, as if from an impulse to preserve what can be preserved, many of these poems keep looking to family members, and the past ... The structure of The Hurting Kind underscores the ways that memories of a few family members and friends, dead and still living, are permanent parts of one’s mental landscape ... The natural world itself is another recursive subject, with joyful and distressing implications. As with Limón’s previous work, if you observe and delight in nonhuman life, you start observing what nonhuman life endures, largely at the hands of humans ... I want to end by emphasizing both the funniness and the earnestness audible in these encounters, enhanced by the formal possibilities of surprising line breaks, traces of set rhythms, and unlooked-for internal rhymes.
Yusef Komunyakaa
RaveOn the SeawallKomunyakaa can elicit a startling wealth of resonances from a single word. He continues to do so in this book, though most of the newest poems bring his familiar subjects and techniques into a slightly more subdued, pared-down register ... Music pours through ... This new selected continues to bear out that no one has described conflict and all its collateral as probingly as Komunyakaa ... Komunyakaa’s bracing range of interrelated subjects...often change register and perspective not just between pages but between sentences—much as what is in one’s brain can change from second to second ... In Komunyakaa’s hands, quatrains can snap into epigrammatic closure or wheel about into a new direction[.]
Patricia Lockwood
RaveChicago ReviewLockwood draws out emotion in all its superficiality, power, and contradiction ... In drawing together the late 2010s internet and a child with a debilitating disorder, Lockwood sets up an antithesis that initially looks overdetermined ... Thanks in part to all our received ideas about the internet’s lack of real connection, it might seem that the noisy online world is a mere foil for a subsequent, intense experience: a pit of fear in one’s stomach, helpless fury at Ohio legislators, equally helpless love, loss that one can see coming months in advance ... But No One Is Talking About This derives much of its strength and strangeness from that juxtaposition, because what seems like a stark contrast turns out to be porous at almost every point of contact ... Lockwood also avoids actual labels for most of the myriad viral phenomena she mentions ... This mixture (the particular kept particular but submerged under abstraction) documents the contemporaneity and glut of the internet, without sounding judgmental or overly affirmative ... The book’s rhythms prevent its cultural critique from feeling heavy-handed ... The book may or may not be autofiction. The protagonist of this novel resembles the person Lockwood presents on Twitter and in her memoir: mercurial, unfiltered, given to falling over in public ... The ambiguity intensifies Lockwood’s reflections on what is one’s to tell or to splice with fiction, and about the difficulties of being truthful in any genre. Whatever the ratio of fiction to nonfiction, No One Is Talking About This is utterly convincing in how it registers everyday, idiosyncratic reactions. It amplifies the kinds of feelings for which we don’t have categories through its quick changes of register: tenderness followed by loud caricature, farce followed by insight ... No One Is Talking About This captures how real-life feeling is a muddle even rangier and more inappropriate than the internet itself.
