Category: Reviews & Criticism

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,…
“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…
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…
“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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…