Category: Reviews & Criticism

Poetry Review: Luis Neer Reads Nervous Universe by Kate Monica

1. At the end of March, I was in Charleston, West Virginia, with my high school theater troupe for the State Thespian Competition. It was raining. My best friend Jordan, a burly, bear-shaped senior, was having legitimate relationship issues. He had just been on the phone arguing with his girlfriend for several hours, they were…
The Glacier, a cinematic novel by Jeff Wood, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

The blend between novels and other mediums is not new. Prose poems, poetic novels, fictional histories … there is constant flux to reach the boundaries of the novel, to escape and run rampant in the minds of their readers. Jeff Wood’s The Glacier continues, and in many ways builds off, that tradition by recreating the…
Poetry Review: Thomas Cook on Confidence by Seth Landman

Confidence is divided into three roughly equal sections, each of which comprises a single long poem, each long poem comprising a few dozen long stanzas comprised of short lines, no more than a beat or two and without punctuation. The book’s lyric moves, therefore, at the pace of the speaker’s one-to-two-beat flitting thoughts, formally reflecting…
Poetry Review: Jacob Collins-Wilson Reads Women in Public by Elaine Kahn

Women in Public, by Elaine Kahn, is a book that pairs well-crafted poetry with sucker-punch direct statements. Think surrealism but instead of image juxtaposed with image, it’s image juxtaposed with concept/idea/point. It’s an interesting pair, one that follows, in concept, surrealism, but ultimately does the opposite because surrealism never tries to make a point aside…
There’s Something I Want You to Do, stories by Charles Baxter, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

The epigraph from Primo Levi’s The Reawakening sets the stage for Baxter’s latest collection: “Everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography.” These stories, or “biographies,” pack depth and distance so that they become an accumulation of moments…
“Revisiting Jurassic Park”: On the Novel Adapted for Film by Sean Hooks

Michael Crichton wasn’t so much a genre writer as he was just a legitimately smart guy, a six-foot-nine-inch polymath brimming with audacity. He was a skeptic, an oracle, a Cassandra, a brand, a protean force. His November 2008 obituaries made much of the fact that he was at one point simultaneously responsible for the top-rated…
“Some Planets Are Portals”: Carolyn DeCarlo Reviews john mortara’s some planet

Picking up some planet, the reader is greeted by a series of talismans, mostly circular: a moon, a nickel, a cosmic orb, a tooth encased in dark matter, and a hand inscribed with a pyramid. These are poems by john mortara, it says. You are on some planet. john’s first full-length collection of poems, published…
“Somebody Is Watching You”: Benjamin Kinney Reviews Watchlist, an anthology edited by Bryan Hurt

Somebody is watching you. In fact, when you clicked on this article, a record of your visit to this page was made in a database somewhere. And decades from now, somebody a thousand miles away whom you’ve never met could verify that you’ve seen these words. You couldn’t have prevented it; this is the age…
The Great Medieval Yellows, poetry by Emily Wilson, reviewed by Timothy Duffy

In James Galvin’s introduction to some of Emily Wilson’s poems in the Boston Review (for a “Poet’s Sampler” section devoted to her work in 2002), he argued that Wilson’s poems “are not written for analysis, perhaps not even for approval.” He calls the poems “strenuous as the thinking they freight” and “unresolvable as their passions.”…