Capitalism abhors a creative gathering place—otherwise auto dealerships would put on poetry slams and hardware stores would host book clubs, wouldn’t they? While coffeehouses and restaurants often step up to […]
Conducted by Binx Perino I learned of Daniel Borzutzky’s work after reading Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). I had just moved to Chicago and was interested in the […]
Interview by Binx Perino. In preparation for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2024 Annual Conference, I organized a poetry reading to benefit Kansas City based mutual aid groups […]
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders if he […]
In the humid loam of a Jurassic-era feeling Southern United States, poet Hannah V. Warrendebuts her collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress Publications, January2024). Betraying the old adage, you […]
Interview conducted by Binx River Perino. Chicago-based writer Diego Báez is an educator at the City Colleges and a fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator […]
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]
The 2023 Chicago Review of Books Awards shortlist includes literary works ranging in subject matter from queer motherhood to belonging and migration, Chicago’s Black cowboy culture, and women’s overlooked heroism during World War II.
Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative Homer: […]
In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth—at broken hearts and […]
Reviewed by Michael Leach Patrick Reardon’s epic poem The Lost Tribes is a cri du coeur as thrilling for our time as Alan Ginsberg’s Howl was for his. It celebrates […]
The title of Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney’s new, award-winning collection of poetry, serves as both question and commentary to start off the book. Where are the snows, anyway? […]