His central question: what does being Puerto Rican mean to me now, given that it has meant nothing through most of my life?

The crux of Brookins’ resistance: to find beauty in the fight, and to acknowledge that imagining is good, but having is better.

Realizing that you are driving, or perhaps living, toward an unattainable life fuels the collection’s philosophical musings. 

Elektrik is translation operating as good translation should: as a megaphone for writers who might otherwise remain unheard in the Western canon.

Where is the balance between wallowing in the past and reverent remembrance? How do we keep the present alive without abandoning who we’ve become?

All these strategies prod both the reader and the narrator to consider what she isn’t prepared to express outright.

Again and again, de Kerangal invokes the imagined threat of the forbidden country.

These poems are saturated with images of Antigone, autonomy, and the diaphanous film that stands between us and death.

Does our trauma guide us towards the darkness, or could our trauma act as a sort of beacon, inviting the darkness in?

Ulrich’s stories poke and prod at the world, creatively and intelligently, and refuse to flinch or turn away from what it offers up.

The stones are burdens given to the speaker, but also accepted. Women are taught to abide. Taught to carry.

The fluidity of the sea finds an equivalent in the fluidity of memory. Crews constructs a world (and a love) that transcends time’s usual strictures.

Above all, Someone Who Isn’t Me yearns to sound a pure, clear note. The note is life, “as if our bodies are expensive stereos and life was a song that lasted only as long as we could hear it.”

This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. Sender’s collection screams, “Pay attention. Why is love so hard?”

All of it combines — maybe it was never separated — the language the character the narration, me, the reader, the world in which we read this.

Here, memory is both personal and communal. The four sections of the collection cross time and space, braiding together difficult experiences.

To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once.

It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so their English reaches for oracular truths.

Crossman doesn’t want to put a bow on things--the fear of loss persists; it’s merely taken new shape.

The title of this collection of essays is as much an admission as a threat. Or rather, as much an explanation as an expiation.