Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“To the West of Western”: Ryan Kauffman Reads Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay
Louis L’Amour once said that if a story takes place in a long-ago time west of the Mississippi River, then the story is a Western. It’s a simple definition—one that certainly helps to classify the works of big names such as Grey, Schaefer, McMurtry, and L’Amour himself—but the literary directions taken by some contemporary authors…
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Fiction Review: Robert Loss Reads Don’t Start Me Talkin’ by Tom Williams
I’m sitting down in Rosie’s reading Tom Williams’ novel Don’t Start Me Talkin’, thinking about the title song and how, like so many blues songs, it’s a secret door: press on it the right way and a series of passageways opens up. Maybe you enter at the New York Dolls’ 1974 nostalgia-turned-inside-out version on Too…
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“How Long Has It Been Since You Really Rocked?”: Linda Michel-Cassidy Reviews If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home by Dave Housley
Imagine a trust fall where, instead of a bundle of coworkers who you didn’t like to begin with, you drop into the arms of Metallica. Or The Ramones, or Nirvana, or even Jimmy Buffett, if that’s your jam. The players in If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home are permanently ready to…
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On the Way, a novel by Cyn Vargas, reviewed by John Brown Spiers
“Love isn’t everything,” proclaims the back cover of Cyn Vargas’ debut collection—and, indeed, love is often in short supply. On the Way is a group of stories that are often about loss, regret, and unrequited feelings. What almost every story demonstrates is the moment in a character’s life beyond which everything will have to change.…
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Poetry Review: Jordan Sanderson Reads Brain Camp by Charles Harper Webb
“[H]eadlights lance the air,” Charles Harper Webb writes in “Questionable,” a poem about teenagers parking in the “night-woods.” This stunning image might serve as a metaphor for what Webb does in all of the poems in Brain Camp. Concerned primarily with the passage of time, the collection contains both deeply personal poems and critiques of…
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Poetry Review: Michael Schmeltzer on The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith
The Japanese fairy tales I remember from childhood involve infertility. Often there was a kind old woman and an equally kind old man, both bowed in prayer, both wishing for a child. Miraculously, a child would appear—in a giant peach floating down the river, in a shoot of bamboo. After I moved to the United…
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Book Review: Vivian Wagner on Like a Song, an essay collection by Michelle Herman
Reading Michelle Herman’s essays is like sitting down with a friend over coffee and discussing life, love, TV, and parenting. She’s conversational and intimate, and she makes this kind of writing look easy. Don’t let that fool you, though: her work is carefully and beautifully crafted, and her recent collection, Like a Song, is no…
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Fiction Review: Chris Liek Reads Witchita Stories by Troy James Weaver
Troy James Weaver’s collection Witchita Stories takes us back to our childhood, our hardest years, and the struggles that come along with it. These short short stories give us glimpses into the life of the narrator and his relationships with his brother and parents—and his fear of becoming just like them. Weaver revamps the coming of…
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“The Final Frontier”: Fantasy, poems by Ben Fama, reviewed by Carolyn DeCarlo
Opening the envelope that contained Ben Fama’s Fantasy was an exhilarating experience. It had been raining for several days when I noticed the wet package stuck to the bottom of my mailbox. While many books have succumbed to a fate of shriveled pages, warped and discolored covers in this way, Fantasy came out of its…
Heavy Feather Review 