Politics is funny. So, twenty years ago several disenchanted Republican Senate staffers performed some satire for an office party. It was the beginning of the Reagan era, and the staffers were working in subcommittees responsible for... Read More

“Poverty stands fully revealed, naked, a striking, repulsive sight to a stranger until all feeling of condemnation melts into an all-absorbing compassion,“ wrote Ana’s Nin while visiting Cuba in 1922. Deeply attuned to many of the... Read More

In his forceful long poem in eight parts, “Quatrains for a Shrinking World,“ the author writes: “but I am merely Cuban, dark and small / as any from a hundred nations which / exists for others’ domination.” Later in the poem he... Read More

“Love, what we’ve lived through together / has not killed us yet” are the words of a woman who has lived raw and close to death. The author, a long time AIDS educator, also weathered the trauma of her partner’s organ failure and... Read More

The necessary kindling is what ignites, and in the title poem it begins this way: “when she awakens, / she remembers / the shape of her own breath, / pressing it / into the heart of her words.” So, like all first words, this... Read More

The fist in the title is an appropriate image for a book of poems about rough edges and marital disillusion, though this fist is womanly-curvaceous and quick. The poet’s rage is elegant, but she’s not wholly resentful, perhaps... Read More

In this, Liu’s fourth book of poems, the evidence is the minutiae and banalities that comprise everyday lives; each moment is made extraordinary in its realness, both brutal and beautiful. “Sometimes blood. / Or bruise or death you... Read More

“I’m lying a little: that goes without saying.” Nabile Fares, unabashed and undeterred admits his tactics in an essay entitled “The Memory of Others.” He proceeds with his story, as each of the authors in this collection must,... Read More