Editor (now alumna) Maddie Woda reviews Jihyun Yun’s first collection, Some Are Always Hungry. In 2016, I stumbled upon Jihyun Yun’s poem “Recipe: Dak-dori-tang” in BOAAT. A freshman in Columbia’s English program, I was beginning to develop my taste for poetry. I liked narration, freshness, unapologetic earnestness. I did not want too much room for interpretation, worried I’d fall through the cracks and say something ridiculous in class. I preferred James Wright to John Ashbery. I could not name any poets who were not deceased white men. I read “Recipe: Dak-dori-tang” and immediately fell in love with Yun’s style. While…
The Oldest College Literary Magazine in the Nation
From book review
Everything is Personal, This is Personal Too
Editor Emmi Mack reviews Laurie Stone’s latest collection, Everything is Personal: Notes on Now. In her latest collection of hybrid nonfiction, Everything is Personal: Notes on Now, Laurie Stone presents her thoughtful brand of cultural criticism through deeply intimate snapshots of memoir. Her perceptions of art, both contemporary and what’s stuck with her for decades,…
Finding What is Lost in C. J. Tudor’s The Other People
The Other People / C J Tudor / Ballantine, 01/20 – $27 (Hardcover) There is something relentlessly engrossing about a mystery. The suspense, the shock, and finally the catharsis when all the pieces come together create a reading gripping experience that cannot be found elsewhere. The Other People, the most recent novel from C. J.…
Arcana, Alive: Anne Serre’s The Fool
The Fool and Other Moral Tales / Anne Serre, trans. by Mark Hutchinson / New Directions, 09/19 – $15 (Paperback) Repulsive, violent, confounding: that’s how I would best describe Anne Serre’s newly translated collection of short stories, The Fool. Yet Serre performs a wild alchemy within the tight confines of the three fabulous tales collected…
Mystery At the Edge of the World: A Review of Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth
Disappearing Earth / Julia Phillips / Knopf, 05/2019 – $27 (Hardcover) “In Kamchatka,” Julia Phillips told the Paris Review, “you can slip between the cracks so easily.” Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth, tells the story of two young girls who get kidnapped from the Kamchatka Peninsula on the northeastern-most edge of Russia. It is a…
A Phoenix from the Ashes: Myth and Memorial in Sara Stridsberg’s Valerie
Valerie, or The Faculty of Dreams: A Novel / Sara Stridsberg, trans. by Deborah Bragan-Turner / FSG, 08/2019 – $27 (Hardcover) Valerie Solanas’s Wikipedia page begins: “Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist and author best known for writing the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.” It…
Babel Unbuilt: Alan Shapiro’s Against Translation
“Beginning with the fall of towers and ending with the emergence of a new voice, the mastery of Against Translation is clear…”
A Diorama of Memories: Claire Millikin’s Ransom Street
“Spectres linger in the poems of Ransom Street…”
Reading Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree
Midterms season is probably not the best time to read an 848-page novel pertaining in no way to your exams, but the mind has curious ways of reorienting your priorities at the exact moment you most need them to remain resolute. That is the briefest explanation of how I came to read The Priory of…