NewPages Book Reviews

Editor Patrick ten Brink has rounded up a mix of genres for the newly released The Circle: A Brussels Anthology.

Quinn Boyle, a deep-sea fisherman, and his older brother Robbie, a sports journalist, lead an impressive cast of characters looking for answers to some mysterious disappearances in Edward J. Delaney’s book Follow the Sun.

stage
you are not suppose to be here
yet you are –
some natural contradiction.
your snarl and ravenous appetite—
fiction. an imagined geography.

Black bodies or the scene of the crime

Chaun Webster’s GeNtry!fication defies labels. Chapbook? Full length collection? Manifesto? Academic essay? Diatribe? Graphic novella? Epistles? Jazz improvisation? Or classically structured symphony?

Is it too early to start experiencing holiday dread? Probably. But that hasn’t stopped me from practicing political arguments in the shower and sulking on the couch while binge-eating. However, I did stumble upon some needed comedic relief the other day in the form of some questionably helpful letters written by Zack Sternwalker.

Scoundrels Among Us is definitely a man’s book. There aren’t too many female characters, and as much as I want to criticize it for that, I’d be lying if I said that the book never made me laugh. It’s full of terrible, dark humor, sometimes absurd—in the best possible way (think Daniil Kharms, or even Bob Kaufman). There are kids on fire, sitting in class with charred skin, a group of nine brothers that work at a Costco-esque department store, all pretending to be the same person, and a man, who’s dying alone in a forest, and his last wish is to have an extra-large Cajun Deluxe Meat Lovers pizza delivered to his exact, addressless location.

I was nervous going into this book. I imagined a comparison between two poets to be full of abstruse information on cadence and meter, et cetera. To Float in the Space Between is indeed a comparison between the author, Terrance Hayes, and the late “prison poet,” Etheridge Knight; however, at no point in time does Hayes leave the reader out in the storm. He invites us inside, shares a cigarette, and lets us borrow his skin for a couple hundred pages.

where I am
farthest from my mother
waiting
on 200^th St

What is Not Beautiful is strikingly beautiful. Like the first snowflakes on a fallen autumn leaf, Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s words are delicate, insightful and sublime.