Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Sam Slaughter on In the Season of Blood & Gold, a novel by Taylor Brown

Even though it hasn’t happened yet, you get a sense after reading In the Season of Blood & Gold that Taylor Brown has seen the end of the world and when he saw the end of the world, he wrote down everything that happened. In his debut story collection, the Montana Prize for Fiction-winning author…
Poetry Review: BJ Love on The Three Einsteins by Sarah Galvin

The best jokes are linear. This happens and then this happens and then punch line. They work because they feel inevitable. Of course the chicken crossed the road because he wanted to get to the other side. Of course cheese that isn’t yours is called nacho cheese. Of course the old man upon hearing his…
Fiction Review: Louise Henrich on We Were Flying to Chicago, short stories by Kevin Clouther

We Were Flying to Chicago explores the weariness of life when you don’t become who you expected to be, and the loneliness of trying to connect to others in that existence. This collection has two very different types of stories. The titular story, “Open House,” and “I Know Who You Are” are propelled by their…
Book Review: Sarah Katz on The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, a poetry collection by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The forty-two poems in Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s latest poetry collection, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, are an enchanting epistemic study of the interaction between character perspective and language. Each poem, a “triptych” of three stanzas depicting three unusual characters—an old woman full of memories, a sultry tulip wearing an “upturned skirt,” and…
The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013, edited by Daniel Lawless, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

When I was a child, I would spend hours gazing into my View-Master, clicking through image after image and then clicking through them again. Each image seemed to transport me to this other world, where the landscapes and characters were distinct but unified by a certain slant of light. I wanted to stay in that…
Instructions for the Orgy, a poetry chapbook by Jeffrey Hecker, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

Jeffrey Hecker’s Instructions for the Orgy begins with the preparation of “the loving space.” “Delouse” it, the speaker tells the “first to the orgy.” This is the first of many directives to the roughly ten people (one guy gets locked in a woodshed and there’s a “line of braided Wiccan women,” whose accompaniment of Reed…
Leaving the Pink House, a memoir by Ladette Randolph, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

Ladette Randolph’s memoir tells of how she and her husband purchase a Nebraska farmhouse the day after 9/11 and spend the next eleven months renovating against the ticking clock of a bridge loan. It would be too pat to say they’re building their dream house; Randolph already lives in a home she loves. Instead this…
Like a Woman, a novel by Debra Busman, reviewed by John Vanderslice

The horror stories of kids, especially lesbian and gay kids, forced into the world of prostitution, with its coincident realms of drug abuse and violent assault, never get less horrific or heartbreaking. Debra Busman, who co-directs the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University at Monterey Bay, and whose profound sense of…
Poetry Review: CJ Opperthauser on ECODEVIANCE, a how-to guide by CAConrad

CAConrad’s latest book serves as a how-to guide—through (Soma)tic rituals, we see the prompt and the resulting poems, pulling the curtain on the revered role of poet. The reader’s invited to perform the same writing exercises, however deep they may be in crystal-fused ritual, and in turn the identity of the writer is opened up…