Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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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…
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The Living Method, a poetry collection by Sara Nicholson, reviewed by Sarah Katz
The cover of The Living Method is reminiscent of that painting, “Vertumnus,” by Guiseppe Arcimboldo, (ca. 1590)—so reminiscent that, save for its red monochromatic color scheme, it’s a close replica of the original. Fertility, this image expresses (as the original does), with all its grape lips and hair and potato cheeks, and yet, the redness…
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Faulty Predictions, stories by Karin Lin-Greenberg, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
Karin Lin-Greenberg’s collection, Faulty Predictions, winner of the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, wonderfully captures the moments when characters begin to see beyond their preconceptions into a fuller view of their lives and others’. The moments themselves are both large and small—ranging from a high school student’s suicide to a sister and brother’s…
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“Sprezzatura Is as Sprezzatura Doesn’t”: Daniel Scott Parker on Mike Young’s New Poetry Collection
“Years, that’s what years do / Yours, that’s what yours do.” This is the kind of tautological ticket stub we get upon entry. Where is is the same as does. But sprezzatura is not what Sprezzatura does, I can promise you that. The blurb from BOMB on the back of the book is a clever…
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Poetry Review: Srah Katz on The Americans by David Roderick
David Roderick’s latest poetry collection, The Americans, is like a massive magnet that draws diverse objects into its field—as any successful book attempting to distill “Americanness” should. A “diary with the trick lock,” “a cherry tree falling,” the collapse of the twin towers, the plastic carts at Target, John F. Kennedy’s death, David Lynch, David…
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BJ Love Reviews His Wife Erika Jo Brown’s Book, I’m Your Huckleberry
My wife wrote a book. A good book. A good book of love poems. Some of them, the poems, aren’t about me. Enough of them are. And a quick glance at the acknowledgements will show you that, even so, this book is for me. I’m the Love the book is “for.” My name is BJ…
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Nonfiction Review: Pacia Linde on Heroines by Kate Zambreno
“My sisters, my mistresses, the spiders stalking the center of the web. I circle them, I weave their tales (or unweave the tales spun about them), I wrap my silken webs around them, I devour them. My black widows, sometimes they leave widowers, they hang themselves by their own threads.” Comprised of memoir and emotive…
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Distance Mover, a graphic novel by Patrick Kyle, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter
*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. I’ve not seen any episodes of Doctor Who, new or old, but there is no reviewing Patrick Kyle’s Distance Mover, it seems, without mentioning the relationship between the two. I take that back: I did at one point see the first half of an episode—one of the newer…
Heavy Feather Review 