Category: Reviews & Criticism

Every Kiss a War, stories by Leesa Cross-Smith, reviewed by Justin Brouckaert

In the opening lines of “Hold On, Hold On,” a character named Violet offers what could be a manifesto for Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut collection: My husband, Dominic, got angry the second time I ran away. Because I promised I’d never do it again and because I didn’t have a reason. Because I didn’t need a…
Rigger Death & Hoist Another, poetry by Laura McCullough, reviewed by J.Y. Hopkins

Rigger Death & Hoist Another is Laura McCullough’s fifth book of poetry (not counting two chapbooks). It is a collection of material previously published in a wide array of venues, sometimes reworked and retitled. While some take a more abstract turn, the poems are generally straight-forward, though not always simplistic. The statements are linear and…
Galaga, nonfiction by Michael Kimball, reviewed by Matt Weinkam

Let’s say you’re interested in reading a book on Galaga. Remember Galaga? Let’s say you’re a lifelong fan of the 80s bug-shooting arcade game in which case of course you remember. You spent your childhood in the local arcade feeding a pocketful of quarters into the machine and maybe you never got the hang of…
Some Churches, poetry by Tasha Cotter, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

A fertile confusion punctuates contemporary English via the language’s conflation of second person singular and plural. The best we get is the contraction, ‘y’all.’ On top of that, we use ‘you’ as hypothetical, or normative, what you might do or rather what one might do were you—I mean, one—in a situation. On occasions where the…
Sam Price Reviews The Shimmering Go-Between, a novel by Lee Klein

Lee Klein’s The Shimmering Go-Between asks for no spoilers on the jacket copy. A piece of paper lodged in the review copy almost demands it. Mostly I’d argue that all plots have been seen before (this argument in itself is simply a rehash of one made many times before by other, more scholarly people, who…
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…
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…
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…
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…