Category: Reviews & Criticism

Louise Henrich Reads The Empty House, stories by Nathan Oates

Imagine The Empty House as a passport, and each story as a fresh stamp. But this collection allows the reader to do more than travel—it forces them to face who they are as a traveler. Do they exploit, patronize and appropriate, or do they participate in a meaningful and mutually beneficial exchange? The stories take…
“Beyond the Scorpions’ Violins”: Jared Smith Reads John Amen’s strange theater

In strange theater, John Amen has written a remarkable, if emotionally difficult book of poetry that plumbs the dark nature and forces of humanity, set against our intellectual striving for human dignity and meaning in a technological age. Cloaked in the style and language of Albee and the theater of the absurd, from which this…
Almost Famous Women, short stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

In her second story collection, Almost Famous Women, Megan Mayhew Bergman delves into the lives of real women who skirted the fringes of fame, feminism, femininity, and polite society, looking at the ripple effects of both the choices they made and the ones that were made for them. Conjoined twins, a self-destructive painter, the illegitimate…
Poetry Review: Douglas K. Currier Reads The Blood of a Tourist by William Taylor Jr.

The Blood of a Tourist, by William Taylor Jr., is a relentless collection of poetry. Set decisively in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, California, the work captures the free-floating, existential angst most of us feel, hopefully infrequently, and cages it between two covers in forty-seven poems. We know we’re in trouble from the outset and…
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…