ASAP/Review

I had the joy of reviewing Grace Lavery's mind-bending and heart-stopping new @dukepress.bsky.social book, Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism, for @asapjournal.bsky.social.

“MOCA refashions [Monuments] to reflect on the possibilities and limits of resistance ... ” Read our newest review by Will Clark on the Monuments exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. asapjournal.com/review/monum...

“Few literary critics have conveyed such intellectual energy and integrity. I see Personal Demons everywhere.” Check out our newest ASAP/Review essay, out now! Jean-Thomas Tremblay (@jttremblay.bsky.social) reviews *Personal Demons,* by Grace Lavery. Read it now! asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Check out our newest Provocations essay on Amy De'Ath's *Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction*—out now! By @azalokostas.bsky.social, @sarahmdowling1.bsky.social, @fintancalpin.bsky.social, and @francesjean.bsky.social asapjournal.com/review/provo...

“Jana Euler turns exhibition architecture into a spatial instrument, making bodily passage a condition of painting.” Margherita Artoni reviews Jana Euler’s installation, *Triptych — Image Viewer Connections* in our newest essay, out now! asapjournal.com/review/jana-...

Our newest review by Gryphon Rue covers Paul Thek, Alex Da Corte, & The Tomb: “Thek wove striking yet ambiguous relationships, crisscrossing time and space, into a charged, associative field: a wax proxy is at once the artist, a hippie, Christ, the viewer, a friend.” asapjournal.com/review/a-fal...

“These incomplete listening projects tell us there is more variation in the act of communicating than machines assume.” In a new Uncanny Juxtaposition, Cheng Mun Chang examines the relationship between sounds & language in Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong & Project Hail Mary. asapjournal.com/review/uncan...

"The book’s gesture to articulate narratives around automobiles and roads from across different latitudes of capitalist development novels is urgent and necessary . . . " Check out our review by Adriana Johnson of Cartographies of Empire! asapjournal.com/review/revie...

It's true! We're looking for a new Reviews Editor! If interested, or if you know someone who'd be a great fit for the position, please send this their way :)

@asapjournal.bsky.social is looking for a new Reviews Editor! Applications are due October 1. No minimum qualifications, and editors receive a yearly stipend of $2500. Please send a CV and cover letter to Editor-in-Chief Michael Dango at editor@asapjournal.com.

First Book Review on the subject of Indigenous Performance Studies! Check it out:

“Relation is not a theme to be curated but a practice to cultivate, sustained through attention, material, and form.” Our newest review on the 2026 Whitney Biennial by Evelyn Hanyue Qin is out now! asapjournal.com/review/relat...

Chengbao Seong-Bo Jin (@seongbokim.bsky.social) writes Critical Dreaming “makes its sharpest intervention not by inaugurating anticolonial critique w/in feminist performance studies...by reorganizing that conversation along 2 axes the field has only begun to inhabit.“ asapjournal.com/review/other...

Hey hey hey! Check out this smart, savvy, and positively glowing review of @franciscondine.bsky.social's brilliant COALITION LITERATURE (Stanford UP, 2025) by Grace Tierney up now at @asapjournal.bsky.social. It's front and center—you can't miss it! 🧡

Okay, I am very moved by how this review just understands my book at a deep level, especially in terms of how the pieces fit together, the stakes of its arguments, and places I couldn’t quite go far enough (but that I hope are taken up by others), and why it mattered so much to me to write the book.

Grace Tierney looks at Francisco Roble’s book, *Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury Multiethnic Writing,* and how it “offers a future for art that expresses and inspires effective protest, drawing on twentieth-century leftist power.” asapjournal.com/review/revie...

“Unknowing Hong Kong enacts a refusal to fall into totalizing narratives…” Wenxuan Xue reviews Alvin K. Wong’s *Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone*—so go check out our newest publication now live! asapjournal.com/review/revie...

“The history of fashion is not only written in fabrics, but also in images.” Check out our newest review, by Rong Wang, about the “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” exhibition, which opened at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in collab with Musée YSL: asapjournal.com/review/photo...

“What is commitment in a world without belief, what is rigor when irony seems to be intellect’s only honest posture?” Katherine C. M. Adams reviews two pieces—my tongue is a blade and Gangsterism—in our newest uncanny juxtaposition. Check it out now! asapjournal.com/review/uncan...

Read our newest review by Vivian Jin, out now, to read about *Diagrams: A Project by AMO/OMA* and how the “exhibition both demystifies the diagram’s authority and operates by it.” Link: asapjournal.com/review/diagr...

“Published one year after the artist’s passing, Performing Chance creates a significant shift in the scholarship surrounding Knowles and her contemporaries..." Vuk Vuković reviews Nicole L. Woods’s *Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus* asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Our newest feature—on AI, writing, and the myth of the author genius—by Ryan Prewitt and K. Wilson, is now out! Read it: “we might learn from the past how to prioritize writing as a practice for the public, rather than an expression of private genius.” asapjournal.com/feature/ai-a...

“Wilson’s Whale Oil stylizes the stages of multiple, overlapping crises, it is a moment to reflect on blockages and breakages that might seem impossible to imagine.” Read our newest review, by @bkwilliams21.bsky.social, of Devin Wilson’s *Whale Oil*—out now! Link: asapjournal.com/review/infra...

Writing in brief yet astute aperçus, Kaitlin Roberts reads moments and scenes from Leonora Carrington’s life that interweave with her own: on phone wallpapers, museum exhibits, street billboards, the deep recesses of the mind, historical texts, search engine results asapjournal.com/feature/the-...

Ariel Nereson reviews Ben Spatz’s *Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research*, and finds the implication that “performance studies has yet to embrace the radical potential of its core belief.” asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Have you registered for ASAP/17 yet? The registration link for our upcoming conference, happening in Madison, Wisconsin from October 15-17, 2026, is now up and ready (for you && all your friends!). Check out our website for more details, or register here: asap.press.jhu.edu/membership/c...

“What solutions, exactly, can the study of literature contribute to the survival of the public museum?” Read Lucy Mensah's review of *Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature,* by Emma Bond, out now! asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Read our exciting new review by Wesleigh Gates writing on Will Rawls, LA, and *Unmade,* a “choreography spun from conversations with the performers about the daily frictions of life across LA’s built environments.” asapjournal.com/review/unmad...

Calling @asapjournal.bsky.social

Catching up on my reading with this timely issue of @asapjournal.bsky.social.

Check out Gabriel Chazan's review of Provoking Religion: "Ultimately, the strongest argument of the book is that the historian of American culture ignores the significance of Christianity...for an exclusive focus on queer history or politics at their peril." asapjournal.com/review/queer...

It’s June 👀 and our newest feature by Jason Alley is out now—and you should read it asap!! “STORIES: The AIDS Monument gifts greater Los Angeles one way to acknowledge an impossible period of loss and a parallel history of coalition.” asapjournal.com/feature/stor...

Professor, cultural critic, and author Myra Bloom interviews intermedia artist and scholar, Eric Schmaltz about his latest poetry collection, I CONFESS (2026), an intimate and lyrical documentation of the extractive and poetic potential of lie detector tests: asapjournal.com/feature/trac...

In our newest review, Emma Peters writes that Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself "applies socially accepted forms of middle-class labor to the messy and intimate object of the break-up email.” Read it now! asapjournal.com/review/revie...

Our newest feature by David Berridge on Katherine Hubbard is out now! “A connection of photographic processes to daily lives that is not solely metaphorical and analogous, and/or something reflexively foregrounded through choices of grain, focus, and exposure...” asapjournal.com/feature/kath...

Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo writes on Adedayo Agarau: “Unlike his contemporaries, the blend of real and imagined events/entities in The Years of Blood pushes the poetics beyond real-life catastrophes, hinting at a certain level of traditional sensibility.” asapjournal.com/review/reima...

In our newest, Margaryta Golovchenko reviews artist Jana Sterbak’s Dimensions of Intimacy: “The flank steak from which [Vanitas] was stitched shone in the gallery light and reflected such a soft sheen that it recalled a satin nightgown eagerly awaiting to be put on…” asapjournal.com/review/jana-...