Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Soni Wadhwa Reads Brian Kiteley’s New Novel Jack & Emily

It is 1988. No one can imagine that the Cold War will soon “end” in the sense that the Soviet Union will soon dissolve. It is the best of the times and the worst of the times to be a spy and in love. That, in a nutshell, is the setting, premise, and plot of…
Poetry Review: Miranda Dennis Reads Remi Recchia’s Collection Addiction Apocalypse

There are many ways to terraform the body. The trans experience might provide a range of tools—some easily accessible, others less so—to transform the body, to expand or reinterpret the materials one was given. But where a transgender embodiment may provide expansion or reinvention, addiction subtracts. Remi Recchia’s Addiction Apocalypse is a vibrant and often…
Book Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Paul Éluard & Max Ernst’s Surrealist Collaboration Repetitions & Misadventures of Immortals

“Max and I were at Verdun together and used to shoot at each other.” This was how French poet Paul Éluard drolly described his first encounter with the German artist Max Ernst. Each had served in his country’s army during the First World War and had fought on opposite sides during the battle of Verdun.…
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,…