After years of living with jaw pain, Maggie Nelson began to write about it. In her new lyric memoir, she describes her practice of cataloging the ebbs and flows of her pain as well as the process of accumulating information from various specialists. “I allow the / tapestry to widen,” Nelson writes as she adds…
Category: Book Reviews
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…
Book Review: Flood by Christine Kalafus
At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)
Capturing COVID-Era Isolation and Illness in Poems: A Book Review of “Days of Grace and Silence”
In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. Wallace was the Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 2023 to 2024, and has written about illness, disability, and…
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…
Garth Greenwell is my Emergency Contact: Meditations on Small Rain
Fittingly, I begin this in a hospital. I am in the vascular medicine department of the Cleveland Clinic, awaiting a routine follow-up ultrasound for the “minimally invasive” procedure I had last week, when I begin organizing my notes for an essay on Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain (2024). I say minimally invasive, because this…
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…
Book Review: Blood Loss by Keiko Lane
Blood is an enduring metaphor for heteronormative kinship. However, Keiko Lane, author of the new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art (Duke, 2024), appropriates the image of blood as a symbol for the queer intimacies forged in coalitional AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. The memoir follows Lane as…