Category: Reviews & Criticism

“A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the Harlem Renaissance”: John Schertzer Reads Jon Woodson’s Novel The Staircase Shuffle

Jon Woodson, professor emeritus of Howard University, most notably author of To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, has of late been self-publishing both his recent scholarship as well as a few novels, collections of poetry, and translations of African writers of merit. I’m a fan of all categories of his…
Poetry Review: Sarah Giragosian Reads Jackie Craven’s Award-Winning Collection Whish

During the pandemic, it was commonplace to hear people talk about how slippery time is. The lockdown dramatized the strange and sinuous qualities of time, the ways that time can stall and slip off the surface of consciousness all at once. These properties of time are difficult to capture, although many poets have tried. Whish…
Poetry Review: Dan Hodgson Reads Diego Báez’s Debut Collection Yaguareté White

By the middle of her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip has worked “English” from a “mother tongue” to a “father tongue” to “a foreign anguish” by rubbing it against what “mother tongues” and “father tongues” mean in relief of slavery-era edicts bent on the “removal of tongue[s].”…
Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody is a collection of 52 poems edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, & Kate Lindroos; they call it “the essential James Tate” and the editor’s note says they thought of it as a “book of beloved favorites.” It’s a slim volume, and every poem in it will give readers the Monty…
“Portrait as Landscape”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White’s Poetry Collection The Under Hum

The Under Hum is a small book that is large and generous in so many ways: double the usual number of authors, and full of lines by modern working poets that “seed” the invented poetic forms and linguistic experiments of this collaboration. The Surrealist feminists have arrived and they come with ghostly memories and scars,…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Brendan Gillen’s Debut Novel Static

Brendan Gillen’s debut novel follows a trio of musicians trying to survive in New York City. Static explores the sacrifices artists make, the realities of who makes it big and who doesn’t, and the messy but sometimes magical process of collaborative creation. The novel is told from the point of view of Paul, who is…
Poetry Review: Jordan Hamel Reads Michael Chang’s Collection Toy Soldiers

The term “Gruen Transfer,” named after some dead Austrian architect, defines the state of idealized hyperreality realized by deliberate reconstruction of a person’s surroundings. Every time you take that first step into a giant mall, there’s a small moment; a moment of disorientation and confusion as you survey the chaos of new surroundings, a moment when…
Fiction Review: Mia Carroll Reads Zeeva Bukai’s Novel The Anatomy of Exile

Zeeva Bukai’s debut novel, The Anatomy of Exile, follows the Abadi family, who in the wake of the 1967 Israeli Six-Day War, moves to America, where the complicated foreign relations of their home country continue to influence their daily lives. This work feels resoundingly timely in this moment of unspeakable violence, but it also reminds…
Book Review: Matt Martinson Reads Russell Persson’s Mix of Fiction + Essays These Threads Who Lead to Bramble

A standard element of any book review is to partially summarize a book without giving too much away, to give a sense of what others will find without telling them everything about that book. But how does one do such a thing for Russell Person’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, where the “sense”—the feelings,…