© 2020 West Trade Review
Reviews
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© 2020 West Trade Review
© 2022 West Trade Review
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"What does survival mean to you? Choi explores this concept repeatedly, looking at it from all angles. There are the Korean refugees who use partially detonated napalm canisters for cooking fires. There is Choi’s own grandmother, stomped on by police. There is Choi herself, trying to make a poem out of all of it."
by Joanna Acevedo
November 1, 2022
"Deceptively simple in its execution and complex in its strivings, it is a gift of a volume for anybody who ponders how language allows us to invent and imagine the world around us and, perhaps most importantly, the world within us."
by Allisa Cherry
October 18, 2022
"This is the powerful writing of grief, the lines and forms strong and clear. He seems confident in his observations, not doubting himself but rather telling the story the way it needs to be told."
by Joanna Acevedo
October 11, 2022
POETRY REVIEW
POETRY REVIEW
POETRY REVIEW
"Shakur’s central strategy for navigating political unrest, family loss, and his queer sexuality is the healing and freeing power of literature."
NONFICTION REVIEW
"The younger Hughes, like his renowned ancestor, explores the vastness of Black identity within this début, in which he, more pointedly, also tries to understand and reckon with what it means to be a young, queer Black man in a nation that has rendered both queerness and Blackness monstrous, if not altogether invisible."
by Mary Sutton
September 28, 2022
POETRY REVIEW
"Soto introduces characters in the midst of change and transition to focus on the brief denouements in life rather than the climaxes, which leaves the stories and their characters with a sense that there is always a new beginning."
by Corrine Watson
September 27, 2022
FICTION REVIEW
"This is a fantastically written book, a deceptively simple read with so much depth and complexity and insight woven throughout, illustrating that Greer is an American treasure."
by Kelly A. Harrison
September 22, 2022
FICTION REVIEW
"The story is interiorly guided—we spend so much time propped up right against the motivations of Agnès’s prior self. And it’s through the recounting and reflecting of these motivations, that the story thematically fractals, taking us from control and power in a relationship between two girls to exploitation in the publishing industry, the effects of WWII on families, class, the “real” versus the “myth,” and the question of storytelling itself."
by Jesse Motte
September 20, 2022
FICTION REVIEW
"Brother Sleep declares war on the people, places, and words that stand against the powers of reconnection and re-creation by calling out the truth of their love for family, of their queer identity, and of the terror and violence against the bodies and minds of gay men. In their arsenal, Amparán wields memory, pain, and love, but not from the ubiquitous emotional landscape. Instead, they draw upon the ancient tradition of mourning loss through oratory, by sharing in poems that separate us from each other and bind us together."
by Mikal Wix
September 13, 2022
POETRY REVIEW
"Working in the vein of the confessional poets who have come before him, he bares it all for the reader—his sudden illness, and his boyfriend’s remarkably tender reaction. It’s in these small moments of tenderness that the collection really shines."
by Joanna Acevedo
September 13, 2022
POETRY REVIEW
by R.J. Lambert
October 3, 2022
