Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…