Here’s what reviewers had to say about our books in 2016.
Cheena Marie Lo, A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters
Publishers Weekly. Review.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-934639-19-1
“The collection, in its deeply moving entirety, seems motivated by this need: asserting questions and answers but also emphasizing that the scope of catastrophes, human-caused or not, eludes our grasp.”
Sarah Burke, East Bay Express. “How To Quantify Absence.”
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/how-to-quantify-absence/Content?oid=4765109
“Lo’s poetry circles around [its questions] like a linguistic storm.”
Jameson Fitzpatrick, Lambda Literary. Review.
“The specificity of provenance or speaker is less important to this book’s impact, however, than the pointed ventriloquism Lo enacts as they shift between voices, tenses and politics from line to line, allowing their jarring juxtapositions to reveal the awful truths narrative can sometimes be used to elide (“how what’s dirty is actually crystal clear”). These appropriations have an informing conscience.”
Geraldine Kim, Weird Sister. “Talking with Cheena Marie Lo about A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters”
Talking with Cheena Marie Lo About A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters
“A book of poetry that challenges what “poetry” can be.”
Hollynn Huitt, Pank. Review.
[REVIEW] A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters by Cheena Marie Lo
“Lo’s poems are powerful and honest.”
Cason Sharpe, Alien She Zine. “Admist Otherwise Most Cruel Animals.”
A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters
“Lo contextualises environmental disasters within the institutional, dissolving the boundary between the natural and the political.”
Julian Francis Park, Jacket2. “Mutual-aid amid aSOUND.”
http://jacket2.org/reviews/mutual-aid-amid-asound
“The book again and again apposes the concept of disaster and disaster’s general un/naturalism with its real sensitivity for disasters’ fields of ambient socioecological loss, losses that qualitatively count the disaster of late imperial capital and its cultural forms, conceptualism most definitely included.”
Emilia Weber, Hix Eros Poetry Review. Review.
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Byy2VTFUpFcnQV9ibUxxOVlVaFU
“I’d love to read you the whole collection now, cover to cover, because what I can’t convey here is how brilliantly it builds, how the language snowballs and accumulates, how rich with interconnections each poem is and how profoundly affecting and important it feels as a whole.”
EXCERPTS:
The Awl: https://theawl.com/a-poem-by-cheena-marie-lo-a27075aa46b2?gi=69fc8d34ee25
The Poetry Project: https://www.poetryproject.org/q-cheena-marie-lo/
David Lau, Still Dirty
Publishers Weekly. Review.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-934639-18-4
“A challenging, erudite, politically conscious, and experimental collection…Lau’s poems are not a single mirror being held up to the reader, but an entire hall of mirrors that one must walk through to experience all of imperialism’s terrifying angles.”
T.C. Marshall, Galatea Resurrects. Review.
http://galatearesurrection27.blogspot.com/2016/12/still-dirty-by-david-lau-and-or.html
“The feeling-perceptions in these poems shuttle between seeing through the hegemonic reality and seeing into another.”
Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune. “Best Poetry Books of 2016”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-books-1211-poetry-of-2016-20161206-story.html
“Lau’s poetics of damaged life cooks with an eerie flame.”
Mike Sonksen, Entropy. “Other Books and a Few More After That.”
“The 53 poems in this collection accomplish the rare feat of critiquing 21st Century economics, poking fun at popular culture and singing poetically all at the same time.”
Entropy. “Best of 2016: Best Poetry Books & Collections.” List
EXCERPTS
Literary Hub: http://lithub.com/resource-optimization/
Prelude: https://preludemag.com/issues/3/still-dirty-subclip/
https://preludemag.com/issues/3/from-the-kola-peninsula-to-lake-baikal/
https://preludemag.com/issues/3/ghost-factory/
Ida Börjel, Miximum Ca’ Canny The Sabotage Manuals
EXCERPT:
PEN Poetry Series: https://pen.org/poetry/etymology
