Category: Reviews & Criticism

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.”…
The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom, a new poetry collection by Noah Eli Gordon, reviewed by Alex Rieser

Noah Eli Gordon’s The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom is a text that takes up the struggle of the word itself. Kingdom weighs in at a boisterous 158 pages and is the longest of Gordon’s thus far eight poetry collections. In this text, as with anywhere else, words are all powerful, capable of defining,…
Book Review: Sarah-Jane Abate on The New York by Ben Tanzer

Ben Tanzer’s The New York Stories are both about and not about his hometown, something he references in the introduction to the collection. Tanzer renames Binghamton, New York, “Two Rivers,” a reference to the rivers that meet around the city—the Susquehanna and the Chenango. Tanzer plays with the idea of town and knowledge, the way all…
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…