RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"In Eileen Myles’s newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles’s new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet’s previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America and its politics ... These poems do not decenter the body in exchange for engaging politics; instead they engage the body politic, which here is inescapably against the state ... Myles’s poems make us reconsider what is experience, and does it have an order or is it a simultaneity? We too often believe when we speak of the interior we speak of something singular and known; Myles upends these notions ... It’s no great wonder that Myles has reached what some might call fame now...\
Layli Long Soldier
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis book troubles our consideration of the language we use to carry our personal and national narratives ... Long Soldier is aware of the American tradition of reading a racial or ethnic identity, especially an indigenous language, as an art form. She has built a poetics that refuses those boundaries, even when she engages with her Lakota identity. Her literary lineage is wide and demanding ... Rather than subverting any particular structure, Long Soldier is leaping into new 'not yet defined' spaces. Whereas challenges the making and maintenance of an empire by transforming the page to withstand the tension of an occupied body, country and, specifically, an occupied language ... Though the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans is void of any gestures signaling sincere repair, Whereas ensures that this grief, this absence, will be given presence, be given a body to wonder.
Solmaz Sharif
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] excellent debut collection ... In Sharif’s rendering, 'Look' is at once a command to see and to grieve the people these words describe — and also a means of implicating the reader in the violence delivered upon those people ... At the book’s heart is 'Personal Effects,' a stunning 31-page elegy for Sharif’s uncle Amoo, killed in the Iran-Iraq war ... An artful lexicographer, Sharif shows us that the diameter of a word is often as devastating as the diameter of a bomb.
