Posts tagged in review
in review: Native Country of the Heart

Native Country of the Heart is a firsthand account of trying to preserve one’s ancestral history when the pressures of elders or society tell you that you should forget one entire culture that led to your birth, for the alleged betterment of yourself. Moraga portrays a sadness and longing felt in part for herself and her burgeoning queer identity, which she initially felt she had to suppress for survival, and a sadness and longing felt in part for her native ancestors and the native populations of the Americas.

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in review: What's in a Name?

In this poetry collection, Ana Luísa Amaral explores the value of naming as a means of bestowing value on the people, places, and things in our world. Through these explorations, she tackles the difficult subject of immigration in a lament on the loss of dignity that refugees and other immigrants lose as they seek to re-establish themselves in a new world.

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in review: Joy

Erin McGraw’s latest collection, Joy, is a mosaic of 52 short stories that seamlessly and humorously capture the multifaceted bits of everyday life. McGraw’s slice-of-life drop-ins of Americans living within their own bubbles distill the essence of people who act with internal logic yet appear borderline absurd to those around them.

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in review: Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955-1975

Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955-1975, presents a comprehensive look at the work of a country exploring the liberation of democracy while battling the injustices of a global capitalist system. Editor Sean Redmond explores these tensions in a review of this compelling exhibition, on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through January 20.

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in review: The Endless Summer

Madame Nielsen’s novel The Endless Summer is an elegy for youth, a sensuous reflection on its fleeting promise and unrealized possibilities. Nielsen touches on gender, sexuality, love, death, and art, but, like her characters, those themes largely remain archetypal, opaque. Rather, Nielsen emphasizes the power of language in memorializing life, in imbuing it with meaning.

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featuresSean Redmondin review
in review: Belly Up

In Belly Up, all of Rita Bullwinkel’s characters are ghosts, haunted, or both. The cast of ghosts includes: dead strangers, dead husbands, dead neighbors’ husbands, husbands in prison camps, the people that frequent 24-hour donut shops, Floridians, and more.

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