Reviews
Thinking Out Loud With Others: A Review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom
without suppression, shaming, or ejection as go-to options, we learn to fellowship differently
How to Order the Universe: a Review
The only thing to keep human beings from being lost in time is the stories they tell, but even these have a habit of disappearing.
A Framework of Angels: Angelicus
Amid days of sometimes groping for the way forward, examples of angelic humility offer a kindly scaffold.
Review: Dialogues with Rising Tides
All to say that the joys and pains, traumas and experiences, pasts, phobias, and hopes we carry influence every particle of matter we contact, initiating change and exchange
Bone Seeker: A Review
Some might call anxiety, too, a certain kind of obsession over endings—when they will inevitably land, who they will take first, how the hell we can prevent them
On The Spectrum: A Review
Through Bowman’s rich and varied essays, he invites us to redefine autism, not as a death sentence or a stamp of medical ire, but rather as a deepening of one’s true sense of a self.
A review of Anjali Enjeti’s essay collection Southbound
And yet, both artistry and activism are born from the seeds of passion.
SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY: A Review
A truly intersectional world has not yet been realized, but Putney imagines it, hopes for it, asks, What might it mean to unmake our binary-loving gods?
Ancient Songs of Us—or How to Face Our Monsters
Cities and names are all washed away, but we’re here, still witnessing and partaking in life, adding more footprints to the eternal shores.
A Review of A.G. Mojtabai’s Thirst: A Novel
I love saying these sentences out loud, hearing the hard ‘t’ sounds resonate, the quiet of all those h’s.
Gathered Together in the Dark, Part 1: A Review of Atomic Theory 7: Poems to my Wife and God
By locating questions of faith and doubt within the atomic, these poems enact a theology where the divine resides within instead of above the physical world.
Review of Melissa Reeser Poulin’s Rupture, Light
Melissa Reeser Poulin’s latest chapbook, Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press), is a journey down the fathoms-deep well of human experience. The poet’s word choice and lines are clear and clean like cold water––and just as refreshing. Poulin plunges the reader into wanting, anticipation, anxiety, and joy.
Song of a Captive Bird: A Review
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
To Remake the World: A Review of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
The Afterlives of American Evangelicalism: A Review of Interior States By Meghan O’Gieblyn
"To be a former believer," she writes in her evocative first essay collection, Interior States, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime." Each of her fifteen essays, wide-ranging in their content, contains an element of that circling back around: to her Midwestern evangelical childhood or to her time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where the threading began to unravel.
Review of The Divine Magnet
Niemeyer foregrounds the ways the letters reflect the writer’s intense moral and spiritual concerns. “That these letters … read much like homilies is a key to their power and genius,” he claims, departing without apology from those who find them more manic than ministerial.
Review of Getting to Gardisky Lake
As I carried Paul J. Willis 2016 collection, Getting to Gardisky Lake with me for the last several weeks, I found innumerable mantrams among the poems, grounding myself amidst Willis’ stories of the wilderness, the classroom, of aging and of loving. It seems there is nothing his poetry does not touch...
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.