by Avey Rips | Apr 28, 2020 | Drinking Gourd
Migrant Psalms prays for a way to make sense of immigration to the United States—now that we realize the American Dream was always an impossible one. Both reverent and daring, this verse interrogates religion, race, class, family, and sexuality. Written as a call to...
by Avey Rips | May 13, 2019 | Drinking Gourd
Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2018 | Drinking Gourd
In Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, Andrew Colarusso hybridizes lost and unknown spaces, taking his title from a falconry term for the cord used to restrain a bird. The word derives from the late fifteenth century, from the French créance (“faith”), also...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2018 | Drinking Gourd
Thiahera Nurse’s Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2017 | Drinking Gourd
Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems in Dulce map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and...
by Avey Rips | Nov 14, 2016 | Drinking Gourd
The University of Hip-Hop is a love letter to the city of Chicago, or, more specifically, to Chicago at a particular moment in the poet’s life. It is a meditation on movement and migration that asks what it means to leave home, how to take home with you, and how...
