Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Noir: A Love Story, a novel by edward j rathke, reviewed by Nick Sweeney
There is something to be said about authors who manage to publish their first writings. There are always tales of novels in trunks in the attic, projects that you just couldn’t find a way to finish or a publisher to run with. For instance, it is one thing to read Stephen King’s Carrie, an incredible…
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Fiction Review: Stephanie Marker Reads I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life by Michael Czyzniejewski
To step into the world of one of Michael Czyzniejewski’s stories is to abandon, either voluntarily or by force, all pretenses, to strip away any semblance of grace or elegance from the sordid mosh pit of human relationships in which we all find ourselves. His work has revitalized a term that bad rock writers have…
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Repairable Men, a novel by John Carr Walker, reviewed by John Vanderslice
It’s always thrilling—and reassuring—to discover a talented new writer in his very first book-length effort. Such is the case with John Carr Walker and his recently released short story collection, the aptly if ironically named Repairable Men. Not only is this one of the shrewdest and darkest story collections I’ve read in years, but it…
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Wild Grass on the Riverbank, poetry by Hiromi Itō, reviewed by AK Afferez
(Be carried from your native land to foreign soil, where you will grow wild and propagate) Marking her return to poetry, Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō is first and foremost a textual space where language can seek out the wildest, most visceral modes of expression. This lush, entangled narrative poem follows…
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A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, a novel by Eimear McBride, reviewed by Jack Kaulfus
Eimear McBride’s debut, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, has finally seen its day. The winner of the Desmond Elliot Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction, and numerous other awards, is a darkly thrilling coming-of-age story of an Irish girl trapped in a life bent on killing her before she becomes…
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Michael Gossett Reviews Super Mario Bros. 2, video game nonfiction by Jon Irwin
“Playing a Mario game is about finding secrets,” Jon Irwin writes in Super Mario Bros. 2, the final installment in the first series of video game books from the innovative publishers at Boss Fight Books. And anyone who has picked up a Nintendo controller knows this to be true: from Warp Zones and Star Worlds…
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Backchannel, poems by Emily Skillings, reviewed by Meagan Wilson
Read carefully each word in Backchannel, for you are warned: “Every word in this poem is a dead body.” Doughnuts and young vegetables, couches and tables, heavy artillery, cobblestones, vibrators, swans, semiotics, cash registers, vegan vitamins, male desire, cosmic tulle. Read them, conscientious of their placement next to one another, noting nods of your head,…
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All Talk, Rich Smith’s debut book of poetry, reviewed by Jacob Collins-Wilson
Rich Smith’s first book of poetry, All Talk, from Poor Claudia, is over a hundred pages filled with play: form, sound, repetition, meta-poetry, character, setting, image and language are all put into the hands of a poet looking to have fun. The first poem, “The King of the Babies”, is a poem that introduces us…
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“Dr. Mario or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ascension of Video Games into a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry That Will Consume Us All,” an essay by Salvatore Pane
I I convinced my parents to buy me a subscription to Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1997. I was thirteen years old and had just saved up to buy the original PlayStation, a console so futuristic with its built-in CD player that I moved my yellowed Super Nintendo and collection of Japanese role-playing games to my grandmother’s basement…
Heavy Feather Review 