RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA work of lyric activism ... With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence to scathing satires of the \'American dream\'...While taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own.
Morgan Parker
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn the popular canon the trope of the \'magical Negro\' is a black character who turns up exclusively to aid, often through uncanny wisdom, a white character. To say that Parker seeks to reclaim these characters oversimplifies the book’s tense negotiations of pop culture, systemic racism and black womanhood. Rather, Magical Negro highlights the white imagination’s more subtle violences, especially those that wear a smile and extend a hand in the name of charity or diversity, all to depict white people as a tolerant majority ... Her audience here is not the white reader who seeks to experience — and therefore tokenize, exoticize and commodify — \'the other.\' That’s not to say white readers shouldn’t read this collection; in fact, I’d argue they should seek it out, if only to push whiteness to the edges of their reading lives ... Parker is a dynamic craftsperson whose associative thinking complicates traditional confessional approaches ... further evidences Morgan Parker’s considerable consequence in American poetry, especially in the way that it demonstrates her skill of nuance. Subtext and allusion abounds in this text, in part because Parker’s dizzying associative leaps reject a hierarchy of \'poetic\' subject matter, recognizing that \'everything is urgent.\' Especially the poems of Morgan Parker.
Sally Wen Mao
PositiveDiodeWhat’s so compelling about Mao’s Asian American futurism is that it employs figures of the past like Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to travel to the United States, and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film actress, to deliver anachronistic dramatic monologues that speak to their time, ours, and the future ... Mao’s use of line breaks charges her poems with a scathingly interrogative subtext ... By embracing futurism, by writing it, Mao suggests that things can be changed so that each of her speakers recognizes herself in the narrative.
Terrance Hayes
RavePloughshares\"Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, seventy poems written in the first two-hundred days of the Trump presidency... honors the perennial efficacy of the historically European form of the sonnet (from the Italian sonetto, i.e. \'little song\') while also challenging readers’ expectations for the form. Full of allusions to figures from Emmett Till to Maxine Waters, Aretha Franklin to Aeneas, every poem in the collection has the same title, and many of them contain an overt or implied address to the \'assassin,\' someone who, in the past or future, would like to see Hayes’s speaker, a black man, killed ... Tonally dynamic and sonically pleasing, these poems insist there’s no difference between high and low diction/culture/art, especially when you’re writing for your life. Hayes spins the poetic form away from its more mannered origins so that it becomes raw, intense, and inclusive of many kinds of American Englishes. These poems feel as if they are written for both the page and performance. And each burns bright, as a \'house set aflame.\'\
