Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Andrew Farkas Reads Michael Czyzniejewksi’s Collection The Amnesiac in the Maze

According to T.S. Eliot, we supposedly read “many books because we can’t know enough people.” Having experienced (and enjoyed) Michael Czyzniejewski’s stories over the years, I’ve always believed Czyzniejewski agrees with Eliot. After reading his most recent collection, The Amnesiac in the Maze, I no longer need to believe; I know. I think Czyzniejewski would…
Poetry Review: Carole Mertz Reads Ida Börjel’s Collection Ma

Swedish Ida Börjel, like the Scandinavian author Inger Christensen, models her collection on abecedary for her striking 2014 volume. Ma, in its 2023 first English edition, however, resembles the Danish author’s compendium only in its structural format. Unlike Christensen, Börjel’s work is a dark, suffering, and probing account that frequently draws on war, deprivation, and…
Poetry Review: Valentina Linardi Reads Erin Hoover’s Collection No Spare People

No Spare People by Erin Hoover is a tale of female resilience, through different circumstances, places, almost through different lives, narrated in clear, easy to understand words. People and scenes are described in a sprinkling of straightforward expressions that make us feel like a spectator, almost an actor in the ongoing play, strikingly so in…
“the I who meets the eye / in the evaporating pool”: Michael Collins Reads Michael Joseph Walsh’s Poetry Collection Innocence

Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence, winner of the 2021 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition, reads like a book-length meditation that cycles between themes and perspectives, continually recreating the experience of consciousness seeing itself and the world anew. “Common Flowers” beautifully evokes our experience of self-perception through creating and taking in—being taken in by—creative work:…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Évelyne Grossman’s Short Essay The Creativity of the Crisis

We often think of crisis and creativity as related states, as seemingly polar opposites that can reverse polarity at any time, transforming one into the other. Crisis can give rise to creativity just as creativity can provoke a crisis in the creator. Think, for example, of Giorgio de Chirico’s illness and state of depression as…
Fiction Review: Amelia Kingman Reads Bronwyn Fischer’s Novel The Adult

Being eighteen is, well, weird. You are treated as a grown-up, but also like a child. The responsibilities are crushing and new, and the world opens up in exciting, scary ways. No one teaches you how to make friends or how to pay taxes. People fall in and out of your life, and the need…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Percival Everett’s New Novel James

I am a man who is cognizant of his world, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. James, the titular character of Percival Everett’s twenty-fourth novel, writes these…
Fiction Review: Brianna Kale Reads Jacqueline Vogtman’s Collection Girl Country

In Jacqueline Vogtman’s beautiful, poignant, and haunting short story collection Girl Country, we are invited to explore the female experience in the modern era through the lens of magical realism and a sprinkling of historical fiction. The stories carry strong feminist themes and universal truths that effortlessly blend with nervy craft. Vogtman strikes the perfect balance…
“Some Kind of Monster”: Stephen Meisel Reads Dave Fitzgerald’s Novel Troll

The trashed halls of pop culture are littered with Slenderman copypastas taken to horrific conclusions and jokes turned into career-threatening scandals. Yes, it’s true. These days, we have a lot of trouble figuring out just how seriously we should take anything—anything at all. Enter Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll, an encyclopedia of cringe, the novel no one…