You can grow up nestled in plastic and still find something beautiful in it. Accola’s work seems to argue that we should try.

But White delivers something more powerful: space where we can imagine these characters endlessly wandering and searching.

If Wendell’s new memoir endears the reader to a demanding narrator, it also summons the reader’s own demands. This book is written by a horse girl, but it is not only for horse girls or about them.

In the end, Empty Hearts just isn’t messy enough to compete with our current reality. Which might not be what the author wanted, but still works in its favor during this long, seemingly never-ending, summer of 2020.

For Toarmino, technology is not just a means to communicate with one another. It embeds itself into what we express to each other.

Feder shows the difficult truth of surviving a loss: that life continues to move, though not in a carefully prescribed direction.

I sit here today, looking at my worn copy of Felon, and feel sad, again. Not for the coffee-stained cover – a sadness intimate to me – but because less than four months ago, things were different.

Twelve is, at its core, a story of women choosing.

What becomes of us, NDiaye seems to ask, when we have no choice but to look below the surface?

It is by way of the voices of this band of dejected antiheroes that Anthropica poses an alarming and timely question: With all we have, why are we still so unhappy?

The we voice, that stubborn collective, merges the two women and takes the reader through two lives lived as one.

Every trauma survivor must become an autodidact of their own pain. By telling Taylia’s whole truth in Like a Bird, rather than flattening her into a more marketable heroine, Róisín locates Taylia’s experience within the body rather than as a response to the catalytic forces of plot.

Denenberg has woven together centuries, tangling time periods. The antiquated meeting the modern mirrors how our impact here on earth is not so easily erased. What we do now does not go away.

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women is a captivating story of Moore’s struggles with trauma, racism, self-love, and self-identification. Yet her family is its beating heart.

Dixon’s words also add to a greater discourse about what it means to see and not be seen, what it means to hunger and not be filled, and how this leads to a desiccation of body and spirit.

Chang’s simplicity is a ruse; she introduces you to a little pile of ordinary ice, and before you can register its coldness, she shatters your big barge with her bigger iceberg.

Sometimes an essay thinks and refers. Sometimes an essay feels like it’s among a sentence’s machineries—the form and context. Sometimes an essay stumps Dillon and he doodles.

Instead of dissolving into her gray matter, these traumas and losses have risen to the surface—like the crude oil from which this record was pressed—to construct, with pain, the spillage of these poems.

In a world where only numbers have value, what space is left for selfhood? How have humans been transformed by this mechanized language?

It’s easy to become lost in these poems, watching as Chang layers alienation and longing with humor and insults; a quick taunt, a fierce left hook. Each flash of tenderness is beautiful and hard-won.