Tag: Shannon Nakai

“Tell It Slant”: Shannon Nakai on Recollection and Reality in Melora Wolff’s Essay Collection Bequeath

“Before she opened the book, and before I entered this picture, I did not know that love is a deed …” So culminates the themes of Melora Wolff’s latest essay collection, Bequeath, published by the Louisiana State University Press. Part ode to a father figure who is a loving, enigmatic storehouse of imagination, part unflinching…
Book Review: Shannon Nakai Reads Joy Harjo’s Selected Poems Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

In her foreword of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years, Iowa Writer’s Workshop classmate and fellow writer Sandra Cisneros underscores the racial and cultural identity of her longtime Indian friend, an identity that made Harjo vulnerable to dismissal and otherness in the…
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, a new poetry collection by Maya C. Popa, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

“I can’t undo all I have done to myself, / what I have let an appetite for love do to me.” So opens the staggering latest collection of Maya C. Popa’s poetry, eloquently titled Wound is the Origin of Wonder. Such an opening couplet would suggest a poem of betrayal or unrequited love, but rather…
Shannon Nakai on Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods

The woods have often served as the storyteller’s theater of magical encounters and warnings. Breadcrumbs, lost trekkers, magic brooks, foreboding creatures—the trappings of the somewhat mystical aura that an uninterrupted primal space lends now hedges a 21st-century rural academic community. Juxtaposing folkloric history against a contemporary college town, Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods…
Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

“Dis–”, a prefix of negation, but also of an absence or removal, serves as the backdrop of Danny Rivera’s debut chapbook Ancestral Throat, an ecclesiastical elegy to his father and primal hymn to human origin. Discharged arias, dismantling chapters, discolored diaries, distended crowns, a dismissed choir: Rivera sings the pain of impermanence as the dying…
The Observant, Ravi Mangla’s second novel, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In his second novel, The Observant, Ravi Mangla takes us into the trappings—both literally and figuratively—of a world fueled by luxury and power, but stripped of real agency. While filming in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, moderately reputed documentary filmmaker Vasant Rai is kidnapped and held captive in a stark prison on erroneous, underexplained charges…
Two Murals, a poetry collection by Jesús Castillo, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

Gracing the cover of Jesús Castillo’s latest book Two Murals is a bi-sectioned black-and-white image: half a fingerprint merged with half a section of tree rings. Both signify the natural coding system for each of these organisms and are conjoined to suggest inherent connectedness. This symbiosis is the theme that underscores Two Murals: humans’ relationship…
Gentefication, a debut collection of poetry by Antonio de Jesús López, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In April 2021, a recently elected city councilman of East Palo Alto championed for local clinics to accommodate a vulnerable, often overlooked community that reaped high COVID rates and less access to vaccines, a problem which he linked to barriers of race and language: “Immigrants and folks of color often by lack of English fluency…
Little Eyes, a new novel by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In its eyecatching green-and-white cover and deceptively simple title, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes offers a playful, incisive critique on what it means to follow a global trend in our increasingly connected, yet increasingly virtual culture. With the contemporary feel and multinarrative structure à la Tommy Orange or Marlon James, Schweblin invites us into workspaces, bedrooms,…