Max Karpinski reviews Jessica Bozek’s The Tales over at Lemon Hound, noting that there is “struggle at the core of this book, an attempt to grow a restorative or transformative utterance from within a language contaminated by discourses of American empire and colonialism.” He continues:

Before we begin the poems proper, we are met with a cryptic preface. In the space of three sentences Bozek provides a framework for her reader, only to immediately explode it….

What follows is a series of short prose sections that mingle the perspectives of the Lone Survivor, government officials (public relations consultants and claims adjusters), animals (birds and dogs), and “fairy tales” told from an anonymous third person point of view. Bozek builds a generically unique text that finds its influences in fields as diverse as science fiction and Native American storytelling. Indeed, The Tales won the NOS Book Award from Les Figues Press; the title of the award, which stands for “not otherwise specified,” gestures towards a blurring of formal and generic boundaries, towards a text that is not easily categorized. Bozek’s experimentation arrives at a genre that both accommodates a dystopian consciousness and gives form to the voices, human and non-human, usually unheard.

Read Karpinski’s full review at Lemon Hound.