Category: Reviews & Criticism

Excavation, a memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz, reviewed by Cameron Contois

In fall of 2008, a scandal rocked my small town, Marquette, in Upper Michigan. Displayed across the cover of the local newspaper was the face of a teacher accused of sexual misconduct stemming from alleged sexual encounters with underage girls in the Nineties, while I had attended Marquette Senior High School. The male teacher later…
Rain of the Future, new poetry by Valerie Mejer, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

The poems in Valerie Mejer’s Rain of the Future are mesmerizing and irresistible, and the translations are first-rate. Mejer delivers a world that is at once familiar and strange, and even before arriving at the series of poems titled “Uncanny,” Freud’s concept of the same name comes to mind. The poems are intimate and immediate,…
Lamentation, a crime novel by Joe Clifford, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

It’s relatively easy to find a crime narrative that’s gritty. However, finding one in which the grittiness intensifies once it stops dealing with guns, drugs, and violence and crosses into the realm of emotions is much harder. Joe Clifford’s Lamentation does exactly that. Clifford takes the broken life of a junkie, big economic interests, a…
“Fuck Philly Roth”: A Literary Treatise by Sean Kilpatrick

You can’t scrub the itinerary off a pilgrim. By no margin is a lap better sucked. Our righteously examined universe has been bleached with tiny egos. So much neurotic journeying I have to confess my excrement palpable enough to find purchase. Does the journalistically plainspoken canon reach deep enough true to form a semblance of…
Discomfort, stories by Evelyn Hampton, reviewed by Emily Kiernan

Evelyn Hampton’s Discomfort is a beautifully constructed collection of stories—slim, spare, and mysterious, contained within a subtly assured voice that gently presses you to turn the pages in hopes that each new story will fill in the negative spaces of the last. The stories do, indeed, complete each other, though through echoes and resonances rather…
The Cartographer’s Ink, poetry by Okla Elliott, reviewed by Raul Clement

I met Okla Elliott in 2004. At the time, he was doing coursework for his first master’s degree and working at a university library. Ten years later he is the same man, only more so—further along in his career, further along in his thinking. He now has two additional master’s degrees and is nearing completion…
The Dottery, a poetry collection by Kirsten Kaschock, reviewed by Jacob Collins-Wilson

The Dottery by Kirsten Kaschock is the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry winning book of poems that explores the beginning of identity, gender and humanity. The Dottery refers to a building where beings with semi-consciousness learn to become good dotters (daughters) and is the focal point or planet around which the poems orbit. The…
The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, fiction by Matt Runkle, reviewed by Mike Jacoby

The title of Matt Runkle’s forthcoming short story collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, led me to expect some fables featuring animals loving and tricking one another, perhaps for the sake of a moral lesson. I’ll save you from that misperception by saying Runkle’s collection is fairly animal free,…
Paper Champion, a new book by Shane Jones, reviewed by Grant Kittrell

Paper Champion, by Shane Jones, is like one hundred eighteen right hooks to your pillow. Like all the things you almost thought you said. It’s a volcano with a false start, plus a thousand. It’s a book you wish you’d read when you were three, and forty-three. If this book were an igloo, it would float. If this book were a sign, it would say “Yes,” would never say, “Wait a second” or compare itself to an igloo. Like, you are taking prisoners. Like, come on. This book is a charred thumb at the hands of a BIC lighter.…