Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Luke Goebel’s New Novel Kill Dick

Readers entering the world of Luke Goebel’s new book, Kill Dick, should prepare to face the proverbial Good News and Bad News. On the downside, it’s a trip to the fall of 2016 when the “orange haze of doom” is not in the rearview mirror but instead steamrolling full speed ahead. An unfortunate stint in…
“A Wild Waltz”: Aimee LaBrie Reads Lisa Slage Robinson’s Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp

To dive into Lisa Slage Robinson’s 13 electric short stories in Esquire Ball is to enter a world where the women must use wit, vim, and chess-like precision to survive a legal landscape fraught with land mines of male ego, greed, and desire. While the stories shift in point of view and plot, a recurring…
“We Are Made of Other People’s Secrets”: Scott Ferry Reviews Lauren Scharhag’s Poetry Collection A Food Court in Hell

I am here to give people the good news about Lauren Scharhag, if you do not already know. She is a treasure of contemporary poetry; not only because she offers us our lost histories in vivid color and taste, but because she heals the exit and entry wounds as she works. She, in many ways,…
“St. Dymphna’s Miracle of Survival”: Fox Henry Frazier Reviews Hillary Leftwich’s Genre-Defiant Playbook

Poet and memoirist Hillary Leftwich’s most recent book, a genre-defiant work titled Saint Dymphna’s Playbook, is a devastating study in modalities of erasure. The book interrogates the almost unfathomably brutal erasure of female/femme voices and identities, as acts of deletion and blotting-out permeate the work via form and content. Resultingly, Saint Dymphna’s Playbook is both…
Poetry Review: Josh Nicolaisen Reads Stacey Waite’s Collection A Real Man Would Have a Gun

Stacey Waite’s A Real Man Would Have a Gun is as jarring and interrogative as its title signals. The poet’s newest release is highly autobiographical and features speakers who often find themselves somewhere between genders while society attempts to place a singular label upon them. Waite’s poems invite us to see the fluidity of gender,…
Nonfiction Review: Kristen Hall-Geisler Visits D. Harlan Wilson’s Kubrickian Filmind Strangelove Country

I was having dinner with a few friends, bookish cinephiles all, so I mentioned that I was reading D. Harlan Wilson’s Strangelove Country. I explained the very basic premise of the book: four of Stanley Kubrick’s films—Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and A.I.…
“Friends Also Make Time to Relax Together”: Jim Feast Reads Barbara Henning’s Celebration of Women’s Friendships in Poetic Prose Girlfriend

Those who know something of Barbara Henning’s life history through the reading of her other works, such as Ferne (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) and Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) will recognize she has followed an unusual trajectory. Coming from a working-class background and suffering an early blow in the death of her young mother, she…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Jess Hagemann’s Documentarian Novel Mother-Eating

Back when I was growing up—a good, Christian boy in the suburban South—there were pretty much three cults that everyone knew by place or name: Waco, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate. That was the list. Sure, our parents would decry large-scale organizations like Scientology and Mormonism as cults, but (fair or not) that was largely denigratory,…
Poetry Review: Zachary Kinsella Reads Flower Conroy’s Bestiary Zoodikers

In their fourth full-length collection, Zoodikers: A Bestiary, the former NEA and MacDowell fellow Flower Conroy dissects tangents of strangeness that perform diversions from the hegemonic toward a new order that is perverse, that is humble, that is shocking. The enigmatic pulse of Zoodikers (the term a 17th-century exclamation defined as “God’s hooks”) spotlights a…