The Blog

I’m the Girl Who Daydreams Her Own Funeral: Anna Journey's VULGAR REMEDIES

Maggie Millner

Anna Journey’s second book takes its name from an exhibit at L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology called “Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” The exhibit comprises folk cures and rituals predating modern medicine; the poetry collection features hypnotic fabulations on memory, fauna, and the body. At times tender and anecdotal, others grotesque and nightmarish, Vulgar Remedies explores the boundaries that divide—or fail to divide—the past from the present, the dead from the living, and the self from the object of its love. If these poems are remedies, they treat symptoms of heartbreak, pubescence, and the vertiginous business of being embodied.

David Rigsbee's SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS

Carolyne Wright

In this volume of thoughtful, reflective, lyric-narrative poems, David Rigsbee's deep psychic engagement with perception, memory, culture, and the politics of human interaction, in all their expansiveness and limitation, is on full display. The poet's sensibility—guided by compassionate reflection and seared by loss—discovers its way forward through the inland waterways of memory to reach for difficult epiphanies. Lyric immediacy alternates with reflective expansiveness and melancholy, and with economy of diction and startling appositions of image and interrogative, Rigsbee breaks open the factual planes—the faits accomplis of events, of names and dates—to re-construe the connections between them.

Kyle Minor's TIR-awarded work in Best American Nonrequired Reading!

Audrey Smith

The Iowa Review is pleased to announce that Kyle Minor’s “Seven Stories About Kenel of Koulév-Ville” will be featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013, edited by Dave Eggers.  Kyle’s story was featured in TIR 42-3 as the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Award in fiction.

Read more about The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology here. The collection will be available for purchase in October. 

Congratulations, Kyle!

Angels Who Incarnated the Void: Dana Ward’s THE CRISIS OF INFINITE WORLDS

Will Vincent

Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds performs the opening lines of Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror in reverse, where rather than threatening to have our souls dissolved as “water does sugar” by the text itself, Ward’s book lands like a Lautréamontian crane on our brilliantine post-modern marsh. Floating above and aware of an avant-garde still obsessed with signs signifying signs signifying signs and conceptual writing that we don’t even have to read to understand, Ward invites us to love again.

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