Category: Reviews & Criticism

Do Not Rise, poetry by Beth Bachmann, reviewed by Emily Paige Wilson

Beth Bachmann’s poetry is morning light sliced by blinds, fragmented and illuminating. It doesn’t burn when it settles on your skin, but its warmth unnerves. Its brightness momentarily blurs all sight. This warm unnerving, this brightened blurriness draws readers from sleep into a realm of sensation and forces us to pay attention. It awakens us.…
Jillian, a novel by Halle Butler, reviewed by Jack Kaulfus

Just know that when you enter a staring contest with Halle Butler’s first novel Jillian, you will not win. You will need to acknowledge your defeat quietly, then find a quiet place to recoup. Butler’s workplace premise is familiar. Jillian and Megan work in the same gastroenterologist’s office. Megan, a miserable twenty-four-year-old, spends her days…
Trances of the Blast, new poetry by Mary Ruefle, reviewed by Karen Craigo

Remember sex in the early days—how you’d become obsessed with particulars and risk missing the big picture? You’d think overmuch about your body, or your movements and speed, or the noises your body made, but then you realized, unless sex just wasn’t your thing, that you needed to give in to a more organic understanding…
Poetry Review: Jordan Sanderson on Missing the Moon by Bin Ramke

There are many moons, the physical moon and the imaginary moon, the moon on which people have walked and the moon on which people have wished, the moon that affects tides and the moon reflected on a lake. Most of the time, we are not aware of the abstract laws that govern our every moment,…
Graphic Novels: The Nobrow Press Omni-Review by Nick Potter

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. I believe I’ve written this before somewhere, perhaps many times and in many places, but when it comes to the book as object, as a work of art, UK-based comics and illustrations publisher Nobrow is the standard bearer. Their books and magazines, ranging from small and concertina-folded to…
Paper Doll Fetus, poetry by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, reviewed by Jacob Collins-Wilson

Paper Doll Fetus, by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, is a short collection of poems about fetuses (think a larger-scale “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens). Some poems discuss fetuses directly while others approach the subject obliquely. However, while this book is sixty-four pages of one subject, not once does it drag or feel repetitious.…
How to Catch a Coyote, a novel by Christy Crutchfield, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

The strange thing about Christy Crutchfield’s debut novel, How to Catch a Coyote, is not that it’s beautiful, but that it manages to be beautiful despite coming from a cesspool of weird encounters, profoundly uncomfortable moments, familial turmoil, unspeakable secrets too dirty to forget, pain, loss, and the down-and-out atmosphere that permeates the underbelly of…
“The Old Reactor Keeps Chugging”: A Reflection on the Writings of David Ohle by Daniel J. Cecil

1. Throughout his entire life, my grandfather has worked and lived as a farmer. Years of shuffling feet, skinny legs pressed to the back of tobacco and dirt stained overalls, he bouncing along in the seat of a green John Deere before a slow, meditating descent into his favorite rocking chair in which he sat,…
Poetry Review: Ally Harris on Contraband of Hoopoe by Ewa Chrusciel

In the title of Ewa Chrusciel’s new book of poetry is the word “contraband,” objects or ideas that are forbidden but desired. Hunks of cheese and obscure meats. Silk dresses, fine vases, a book, an ideology. To smuggle: the transportation of one thing to another space, particles that move but don’t disappear. Contraband of Hoopoe and…