Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Talkativeness, poetry by Michael Earl Craig, reviewed by Kyle Harvey
There is a disorienting, though familiar, quality to Talkativeness, the new collection of poems by Michael Earl Craig. I’m ashamed to admit that, although I have run across his poems in journals, I had never spent any real time with Craig’s work. Perhaps this is why reading the first half of this collection felt a…
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Understudies, a short novel by Ravi Mangla, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler
In Ravi Mangla’s Understudies the unnamed, first-person narrator, a high school teacher, helps his mother overcome her fear of flying, chills with a neighbor obsessed with a female movie star who’s moved into the neighborhood, and learns he’s about to be a father. He speaks in episodic vignettes about his job, his friends, his live-in…
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Made to Break, a novel by D. Foy, reviewed by James R. Gapinski
Foy’s Made to Break follows a group of friends on vacation. They are staying at a cabin in the woods. And like any good cabin in the woods, it becomes more perilous with every page. Readers are treated to storms, mudslides, car wrecks, grave illness, and injury. On top of that, factor in a cryptic…
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The Sea-God’s Herb, literary criticism by John Domini, reviewed by Nichole L. Reber
College lit crit courses. Perhaps that’s the best purpose for John Domini’s The Sea-God’s Herb. His compendium of essays and criticism from 1975 through this year is a rather heavy-handed version of literary (and other) criticism and reminds me of a great deal of material read in my grad school writing classes—in other words, it…
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“On RoboCop”: A Digressive and Somewhat Personal Essay on Beauty, Poetics, and Aesthetics by Sampson Starkweather
The 2011 Kickstarter video to build Detroit a giant statue of RoboCop is, despite what anyone may tell you, one of humanity’s and art’s greatest achievements. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imaginationstation/detroit-needs-a-statue-of-robocop The video is a ten minute rap in a British accent which maps out via mad verbal flow the plot of RoboCop from beginning to end, with sound…
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“Reading Carl Dimitri’s Paintings”: An Art Essay by Evelyn Hampton
Dear reader, this essay is organized into sections; each section is titled after the series of paintings it talks about. All of the paintings referred to below can be seen here. * PORTALS The paintings in this series are made of openings in color and line. I think of the fistulas that form in the…
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“Exile”: Evelyn Hampton’s Fictionalized Account of Reading The Fixed Stars, an experimental novel by Brian Conn
I was not allowed a lamp. This was to keep me from writing at night. But marking words on a page would not have been possible anyway. Everything had been taken from me—my books, paper, pens—all had to be left in a facility on the way to the prison. Worst for me was that they…
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Layman’s Report, a novel by Eugene Marten, reviewed by Michael Goroff
Before writing this review of Eugene Marten’s Layman’s Report, I sat down to watch Errol Morris’ documentary that focused on the same subject, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., for the first time in about eight years. Perhaps because I had read Layman’s Report, I was more struck after this…
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Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, an academic study by Bernard Perron, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt
There was a HOLE here.It’s gone now.—blood graffiti in Neely’s Bar, Silent Hill 2 I never did get to see Hellraiser, though I’d always pause to look at Pinhead’s gridded face on the VHS box at the grocery store, back when I was young and you could still rent VHS tapes at your local…
Heavy Feather Review 