Holly V.'s Reviews

“Let it be said, while in the midst of horror, we fed on beauty—and that, my love, is what sustained us.” Rita Dove’s newest collection of poetry is a prayer for our collective future. Whether musing on love through the eyes of a cricket or investigating the wounds of racialized trauma, Dove writes with clever honesty and radical vulnerability. Playlist for the Apocalypse is the kind of book you clutch to your chest upon finishing, and pray that not a single word of it will be forgotten. —Holly

Melissa Lozado-Oliva’s debut novella balances somewhere between memory and moment, between story and verse, between selves and non-actors. With a form reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and a voice laced with hints of Kurt Vonnegut, Lozado-Oliva carries her reader through a surrealist dreamscape of dead singers, ex-boyfriends, and foggy mirrors that begs the question, “Where does the skin end and the dream begin?” —Holly V.

Starts with a significant moment in basketball history and turns into a lyrical masterpiece about connection, loss, and the intimacy of human witness. Gay writes with urgency and attention, you'll find yourself in tears over a moment from the 1980 NBA finals. For fans of Hanif Abdurriqib and Ocean Vuong, this book-length poem will break your heart in all the right ways, only to put it back together again with force. - Holly

Lauren has "hyperempathy syndrome," rendering her incapable of witnessing pain. This is complicated by the fact that her world is nothing but pain: the novel is set against a dystopian backdrop in which water is reserved for the rich and suffering is rampant. To cope with her reality, Lauren is creating a new religion, wherein God is Change. - Holly