Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Laura Venita Green’s Debut Novel Sister Creatures

A character in Laura Venita Green’s debut novel tells her daughter, “You’ve got to keep the wilderness at bay somehow.” Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town, Pinecreek, in Louisiana, as they. Green blends both realistic fiction, horror, and supernatural elements as the women try to escape past trauma and toxic relationships…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Mark Polizzotti’s Utopic Essay Collection Jump Cuts

Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics, an elegant and thought-provoking new collection of pieces by Mark Polizzotti, opens with an item about poet Paul Eluard’s curiously abrupt disappearance from Paris in March of 1924. Eluard’s months-long abscondment took him to Saigon, with a number of stops at exotic ports…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Susan Landers’ Collection What to Carry into the Future

People sometimes ask poets: “Is your writing true, or did you just make it all up?” The truth (so far as poetry is concerned, anyway) is usually a combination of both, as in the latest collection from Brooklyn-based poet Susan Landers: What to Carry into the Future. The book deftly hybridizes a certain accessible kind…
“A Glass of Milk for Our Collective Gall”: Matthew Zhao on Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Poetry Collection Milk for Gall

Natalie Louise Tombasco invokes Shakespeare to great effect in the title of her debut collection, Milk for Gall, by promising the gamut from comedy to drama and delivering it all with aplomb. The collection’s title comes from the famous speech by Lady Macbeth in Macbeth Act I, Scene V, in which she declares, “Come to…
Fiction Review: Patrick Parks Reads Kat Meads’ Novella While Visiting Babette

In the last few years, the novella has undergone a resurgence. Some observers attribute its newfound popularity to a readership that has neither the time nor the patience for a novel but is looking for something weightier than a mere short story. And while there are now a growing number of novellas being published and…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Wahidah Tambee’s Typographical Collection Eke

Information theory defines its index in terms of the likelihood of being able to predict the next symbol in a sequence. Counterintuitively, the highest information density appears where a string is entirely random. Given the letters “ajhhjnyv … ,” the next character could be any of the twenty-six options available on a standard keyboard. By…
Poetry Review: Jen Schneider Reads Naima Yael Tokunow’s Anthology Permanent Record

In Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive, editor Naima Yael Tokunow queries convention and prompts ongoing conversation in and of the archival record as conventionally styled and fashioned. In the work’s Introduction, Tokunow asks, in part: “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to…
“Language Is the Todeslager of Being”: Notes on Louis Armand’s Golemgrad Pentalogy by David Vichnar

Introduction: Necromodernism and the City of the Dead Necromodernism names the condition of literature after the death of its modernist and postmodernist projects. If modernism imagined the text as a monument to cultural renewal, and postmodernism played among its ruins with irony and bricolage, necromodernism arises when both gestures have collapsed. Literature no longer renews…
“Disclosure of the Divine Through the Self”: Edward J. Matthews Reads Spyridon St. Kogkas’ Avant-Garde Poetry Collection Hermeslang

At the dawn of the 21st century, language is no longer a purely semantic enterprise, that is, an assemblage of words, phrases, and sentences that convey ideas, concepts, and emotions. Granted, language may at times be polysemic, ironic, or ambiguous, which are qualities that have often been exploited in traditional forms of poetry. Today, language…