Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Mia Carroll Reads Sara Lippmann’s Sophomore Novel Hidden River

Cassandra Trout narrates her days as a retail associate at an Eileen Fisher store in Philadelphia and her sleepless nights alone in Hidden River, Sara Lippmann’s sharp second novel. When she receives a wedding invitation from her childhood friend, Sally Sellers, Cass is brought back to the intimate relationship she experienced with Sally’s father that…
Fiction Review: Jarrod Campbell Reads Nate Lippens’ New Wisconsin Novel Bastards

We collect memories and glean from experiences in the hope that they amount to something. Anything. We use these collections to fashion ourselves into something presentable. More human. We strive, struggle, fall short, and often fail. So much of what drives people to follow made up rules in order to play the game of life…
“History in the Bed”: Elena Rotzokou Reads Yelena Moskovich’s New Novel-in-Verse Nadezhda in the Dark

Yelena Moskovich’s Nadezhda in the Dark begins in a room so still it almost seems sealed: two women in bed in Berlin, the lights off, neither speaking. From that nearly immobile setup, the book builds extraordinary motion. The narrator, a Jewish émigré from Ukraine, lies beside her Russian girlfriend, Nadezhda, while the dark fills with…
“Theseus, Snow: A Journey through Hindsight”: Abriana Jetté Reads Rosanna Warren’s Seventh Poetry Collection

Hindsight, Rosanna Warren’s seventh collection of poetry, looks back as it moves forward. A whiplash of recognition, we follow a speaker growing older alongside a country growing apart. The collection opens with “A New Year,” which features our speaker watching the landscape shift from behind the smutty windowpanes of a westward-bound train. She wonders whether…
Poetry Review: Marina Carreira Reads Hugo Dos Santos’ Collection Reduction in Force

In Reduction in Force, Hugo Dos Santos writes from the fraught position of an immigrant father whose sense of arrival has been tethered—perhaps too tightly—to work. While the book takes its title from the colorless language of corporate layoffs, its emotional core lies elsewhere: in the speaker’s effort to reconcile the displacement, masculinity, and care…
Fiction Review: Mel Kenne Reads Vincent Czyz’s Collection Old Man Evil & Other Stories

The twelve stories in this collection are introduced with an epigraph by F.G. Lorca relating to his idea concerning the nature of duende, in a quote by a renowned Flamenco singer who says, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Lorca concludes that “there’s no deeper truth than that.” His feeling was that “[t]he Duende,…
Fiction Review: Emily Capettini Reads Lauren E. Osborn’s Collection Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl

Lauren E. Osborn’s Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl opens with a dedication that is also a promise of what we’ll find inside: “for the insects and girls and those stuck somewhere in-between.” The stories that follow are at turns grotesque and funny, both timely and timeless for their exploration of femininity, monstrosity, and how thin…
“This Landscape Is a Monster”: Adam Camiolo Reviews Mónica Ojeda’s Novel Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

We are living in a shared apocalyptic dream, go ask anyone. Every headline a prophecy of doom, every drizzle diluvian, every vibrato a volcano. The world is being undone, line by line, voice by voice, note by note. It is a time of discord, and Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, the new…
“Explorers of Realms”: Joe Aguilar on Ryan Habermeyer’s Novel Necronauts

Science fiction and Mormonism were born together. Scholar Gillen D’arcy Wood explains how the same volcanic eruption that sent Mary Shelley indoors to write Frankenstein, thus inventing science fiction, also displaced Joseph Smith from Vermont to New York where he received his First Vision, thus inaugurating a new religion. Like the Mormon pioneers who fled…