Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Fiction Review: Anu Kandikuppa Reads Mike Powell’s Novel New Paltz, New Paltz

The cover of New Paltz, New Paltz by Mike Powell sets expectations: yellow and purple—color-wheel opposites; cheery and gloomy; a tear suspended on a cheek; a song—or maybe a cry—erupting from an open mouth. The novel covers a period in the life of the narrator, Ben, when he’s fallen in love with a girl from…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Walter Serner’s Curious Love Story The Tigress

Some years after Walter Serner helped bring Dadaism to Zurich, he broke away from the movement. The Tigress, perhaps Serner’s most famous work, emerged in the period after Serner’s detachment from the art world, and like much of Serner’s other writing, takes place in seedy underworlds—the characters that entice him are criminals and conmen. Serner’s…
Fiction Review: Gabrielle Stecher Woodward Reads Jim Naremore’s Novel American Still Life

A pair of Nike high-tops, a stuffed rabbit, a vinyl suitcase, a laminated graduation photo framed with dried marigolds: these common yet intimate relics are the defining features of descansos. These roadside memorials created on the occasion of someone’s tragic and untimely death are the subject of photojournalist Skade Felsdottir’s big break. As “one of…
Poetry Review: Sandra Fees Reads Laurel Benjamin’s Debut Collection Flowers on a Train

In her debut poetry collection, Flowers on a Train, Laurel Benjamin reminds us of what’s possible if we are willing to revisit broken relationships and allow something else to blossom in their place. As the collection’s title suggests, nature permeates these pages. While we might be tempted to assume these will be nature poems, they…
Fiction Review: Kevin McMahon Reads Hollay Ghadery’s Debut Novel The Unravelling of Ou

In her debut novel, Hollay Ghadery blends a refreshingly unique premise with a natural gift for voice, delivery, and cutting straight and deep, deftly exploring the roots of grief and pain, internalized shame, isolation, and self-disregard. In tracing these headwaters, she reveals how we make it all bearable, somehow. And more importantly, what the elusive…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads john compton’s Collection house as a cemetery

In john compton’s book house as a cemetery we find a feast of sound, of image, of dream-states that blur in and out of place and time. As with all of compton’s poetry, we are immediately in the ether, there are no strings holding the puppets, there are no intermediaries between the void and the…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Gary Jackson’s New Collection small lives

Way back in the 2010s, being interviewed by Emilia Phillips over at 32 Poems about his Graywolf Press collection Missing You, Metropolis, Gary Jackson had this to offer on the topic of superhero comics: “… I wouldn’t say comics are the equivalent of my whole life (my ten-year-old self would feel betrayed); they just serve…