Category: Reviews & Criticism

The Story of My Teeth, a novel by Valeria Luiselli, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Translations are often beautiful and alluring for myriad reasons. They offer a glimpse of a different language and structure, they are between two worlds: meaning and thought. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli and translated by Christina MacSweeney is the true definition of collaboration. It is a work of art meant to be viewed…
Book Review: AK Afferez on The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

Chika Sagawa’s life seems textbook tragic: a young woman with incredible talent in the male-dominated world of modernist literature, dead from cancer at twenty-four. But that would be a reductive portrait of her. Instead, this first comprehensive collection of Sagawa’s poems and prose—diary excerpts, notes and reviews, vignettes that read like prose poems—reveals a complex…
Two-Way Mirror, a poetry notebook by David Meltzer, reviewed by Alex Rieser

“A poet sees what you see but brings back the image in words that makes the seeing more memorable and always within reach,” Meltzer writes in a single-sentence bulleted section of Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook. Brief but in no way small, these shotgun ideas comprise the energy and spiritual structure of Meltzer’s text, a…
Pelican, a poetry collection by Emily O’Neill, reviewed by Knar Gavin

Emily O’Neill’s debut collection Pelican orbits around the loss of O’Neill’s father, yet its orbit is anything but regular. At times, the poet takes a wide arc and soars toward the outer limits of that particular loss, almost seeming to escape it altogether. Liquor, lovers (some better than others), and the moon in various phases fill…
Fiction Review: Brett Beach on Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out by Robert James Russell

L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do thing differently there.” A portion of the quote reappears as a title midway through Robert James Russell’s collection Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out—and aptly. The Michigan, Chicago, Ozarks and Ohio evoked in most of these stories, and the Midwestern narrators flung far afield…
Fiction Review: Jennifer Ray Morell Reads Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels descends into the heartbreaking abyss of loneliness, only to find connections and companionship in the most unlikely of places. Following the intertwined lives of four characters living on the cusp of society, Parry’s debut traces their narratives through New York in the mid-1890s, before the consolidation of the boroughs. Through…
The Lunatic, poems by Charles Simic, reviewed by Sarah Katz

I’d be hard-pressed to tell you that our former US Poet Laureate’s The Lunatic—so apt a title for a new collection from him that it’s almost criminal—differs thematically from his many other books. As in his other collections, the poems of The Lunatic collectively tightrope between divergent brands of madness, challenging us readers to contemplate…
Fiction Review: Nick Sweeney on Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel

Short story collections, especially those containing a multitude of stories, are difficult to gauge. How much constitutes a good or even great collection? Can one or two pieces bring all that good vibe down? Do we feel anything connecting all these pieces together? In Lincoln Michel’s debut collection, Upright Beasts, we find answers to all…
Poetry Review: AK Afferez on Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

There may be effusion in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, but there’s definitely no mawkishness, no syrupy sentimentalism. Ferociously earnest and jubilant, Ross Gay’s third collection is not simply an ode to finding gratitude for the things we usually take for granted: it is a triumphant declaration of love for the world we live in. Here,…