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Mar 4, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Mandana Chaffa |Halima Elmajdoubi
“Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens (New Directions), a collection of older and newer poems, offers further proof of her importance in the contemporary American poetry landscape. Mayer’s poetry has always been an exuberant embrace of quotidian life—from the justly celebrated Midwinter Day to decidedly unstuffy sonnets, trenchant commentaries on politics, and gorgeous chronicles of nature—in ways lyric, funny, arch, multitudinous, and always true.
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Mar 3, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Jo Livingstone |Halima Elmajdoubi
In the excellent English translation by Sophie Hughes, Alia Trabucco Zerán recounts talking about her book, originally published as Las homicidas.
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Mar 2, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Halima Elmajdoubi
If Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor became mathematics professors and decided to collaborate on a spoof of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, they might come up with something like Percival Everett’s Dr. No (Graywolf). Everett borrows his title from Fleming and the movie, as well as the basics of the spy thriller, but the rest is the fruit of his astonishing imagination.
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Feb 28, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Adam Dalva |Halima Elmajdoubi
and I see that I am writing the NBCC citation for A New Name: Septology VI-VII (Transit Books), yes,and I find after I go back and read Septology I-V that though I was first drawn toward the novel’s form, especially the long sentence that runs through it, stuttering here and there with dialogue and conjunction and affirmation and conjecture, I now think that the narrative line runs even more extraordinarily, yes, because I think that Fosse and his translator Damion Searls have created...
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Feb 27, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Jo Livingstone |Halima Elmajdoubi
Of all the books published in 2022, I gave only one to my optometrist. Dr. Cheng shares his storefront reception area with a sweet little dog, and I’ve often wondered what the animal sees when it looks at me. I thought of them both when I learned the truth, which you will have to look up for yourself in Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Random House).
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Feb 24, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Jo Livingstone |Halima Elmajdoubi
The fact that language mediates reality is one of those human conditions which can feel banal to remark upon. Rachel Aviv argues for its peculiarity and interest in her sparkling debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), through stories about the language and literature of mental illness. Ethical conundrums, especially those that appear in medical contexts, are the classic Aviv subject.
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Feb 22, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Mandana Chaffa |Halima Elmajdoubi
Some families have enough musicians to populate an orchestra, others breed athletes, and some, I suppose, create hordes of CPAs. In Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s family, there are generations of healers, seers, and, in the purest sense of the word, storytellers.
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Feb 21, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Rebecca Frank |Halima Elmajdoubi
The speaker of Cynthia Cruz’s Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books) inhabits hotel rooms in Warsaw, Berlin, and Belgrade, anonymous rooms simultaneously serving as archives of memory and as blank interiors packed with ephemera: “white stockings in dot- / like patterns,” magazines, postcards, “academic texts on fragments, and a ticket / roundtrip, to Warsaw or Kiev.” Polaroids paper the walls.
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Feb 17, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Jacob M. Appel |Halima Elmajdoubi
The Gaza of Mosab Abu Toha’s childhood is a land of tortured ambiguities, a precarious, uncertain place where “you don’t know what you’re guilty of,” where “breathing is a task” and “smiling is performing / plastic surgery,” as he writes in two poems from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights). Yet Palestine is also a land of poetry, of Mahmoud Darwish and Tawfiq Ziad.
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Feb 10, 2023 | 
bookcritics.org | Diego Baez |Halima Elmajdoubi
Paul Hlava Ceballos’s banana [ ] (University of Pittsburgh Press),born of Banana [ ______ ] / we pilot the blood, his collaboration with poet Quenton Baker and creative scholar Christina Sharpe,emerges from its tête-bêche origin to untangle questions of exploitation, multinational capital, and commodity fetishism. The formal heart of Ceballos’s book, a sequence titled “Banana [ ]: A History of the Americas,” is an exquisite feat of documentary poetics.
