Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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,…
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…
“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…
Moonhead and the Music Machine, a graphic novel by Andrew Rae, reviewed by David Rawson

The story itself of Andrew Rae’s Moonhead and the Music Machine is pretty straightforward: a boy with his head in the clouds feels like he doesn’t fit in, and by being confident, he does become a little popular, but then realizes his art and friendships are more important than trying to fit in. The conflicts,…
The Deep Zoo, short essays by Rikki Ducornet, reviewed by Allegra Hyde

“It is the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things,” states Rikki Ducornet in her new essay collection The Deep Zoo. To her, the unmapped world is of greater interest, as it presents an opportunity “to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language; to move…
The Year of Perfect Happiness, stories by Becky Adnot-Haynes, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

In this collection, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, Adnot-Haynes mines the iffy world of early adulthood, where the players are constantly looking over their shoulders, about to be found out as imposters. The things they’re supposed to want—babies, mortgages, and stable, healthy relationships—aren’t what they really want at all, and…
Poetry Review: AK Afferez on Paper, Cotton, Leather by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Consider this: happy endings, when they do happen, are usually found near the end of the story. We are left to imagine a world of pure unadulterated bliss following marriage and the trials that led to it. Obviously this trend is being subverted by writers and artists who, increasingly, want to look at the aftermath…
The Luminol Reels, fiction by Laura Ellen Joyce, reviewed by James R. Gapinski

The stories in Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels read like a series of inverse flashbulbs. There’s encroaching dark matter on every page, clouding the reader’s headspace with snapshots of autopsy, incest, coat hangers, and blood splatters. Make sure you’re up for it. This book ain’t for hemophobes. Joyce’s collection has moments of light, so…