Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…