Over at The Quarterly Conversation, Janice Lee discusses Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants as a “study of existence”:

But the ants understand the importance of the blurred edges of the world, of uncertainty, of the seemingly irrelevant aspects of our world that band together into coherent images, swarms of ants against the walls like shadows in a cave that remind us of what we might feel if we just turned our heads a little bit. The ants let death make sense, the inevitability of any given thing’s end, the limits and crash, the staggering postures of those left behind. These prose poems become performances for humanity’s own constant negotiation with the unknown and the uncertain, with our own troubled relationships with belief in general.

Read Lee’s full review at The Quarterly Conversation.