Category: Reviews & Criticism

Nonfiction Review: Kelsie Hahn on ZZT by Anna Anthropy

Growing up, I was obsessed with starting clubs. I was also terrible at getting people to actually join them. My Environment Club in fourth grade consists of a journal list of suggested members and possible activities, all neighborhood creek-related. No one on the list wanted to join. No club activities ever occurred. In junior high,…
Half Out Where, poetry by Joseph Aguilar, reviewed by John Vanderslice

Some books, including some of the best, must teach you how to read them as you read them. They are so differently conceived or composed or assembled that they defy almost every reader’s expectations and thus are likely to cause frustration, unless the reader can successfully be tutored by the book to change those expectations.…
Poetry Review: Jacob Collins-Wilson on Post Subject by Oliver de la Paz

Post Subject is Oliver de la Paz’s fourth collection of poetry. Structurally, the book has five different sections, the first and last having only one poem apiece, but every single poem is titled “Dear Empire” and is followed usually by “These” or “This is your …” The first three poems, for example, are titled, “Dear Empire:…
Poetry Review: Michael Gillan Maxwell Reads This Wasted Land by Marc Vincenz

“And Ezra Pound and T. S. EliotFighting in the captain’s towerWhile calypso singers laugh at theAnd fishermen hold flowers” Desolation Row ~ Bob Dylan 1965 This Wasted Land is a ponderous tome indeed. I say that because it truly caused me to ponder, and I haven’t stopped pondering since I read the 902-line poem for the…
Poetry Review: Lucas Pingel Reads Ideal Machine by Ashley Toliver

“Here is where I take you / behind the eyes / a glistening star,” writes Ashley Toliver in the opening poem of her chapbook, Ideal Machine. This is an invitation she extends to her readers to enter into and beyond her conscious state, as the speaker prepares to enter an anaesthetized sleep in a surgical…
Fiction Review: Lixian Ng on Matt Meets Vik by Timothy Willis Sanders

Matt Meets Vik is probably the second novel I have read that is post-9/11. It is also the first novel I have read that has recognized the existence of Nokia phones. By the time those things came around, I believe I was still in elementary school. My memory of them was vague. The events of…
An Object You Cannot Lose, an online chapbook by Sam Martone, reviewed by Phil Spotswood

In Sam Martone’s An Object You Cannot Lose, the reader becomes both gamer and player—their will caught somewhere in the strange place between the pixels, a process that creates a new reality. The reader travels through various levels of an interlocked reality the further they read into this piece. Beginning as soon as they click…
Fiction Review: Mercedes Lucero on A Jellyfish for Every Name by David Rawson

Thought-provoking, ethereally haunting, and at time, surreal, David Rawson’s A Jellyfish for Every Name presents readers with five short stories that explore human nature at its rawest and most intriguing moments. The collection opens with “Touch Me,” which centers around seventeen-year-old Moses’ innocence and longing. In his adolescence, he wants only two things: to “make…
Fiction Review: Brett Beach Reads The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, a novel by Okla Elliot & Raul Clement

A long novel is a different beast. In its pages, a whole world may be contained; characters arrive and depart, suggesting lives begun long before; a reader can spend days, even weeks, tracking the progress of a plot that winds and dips and twists, building inexorably toward an explosive finish. The first book of The…