Category: Reviews & Criticism

A Different Bed Every Time, short stories by Jac Jemc, reviewed by Emily Kiernan

There is a cold wisdom shining through the stories in Jac Jemc’s A Different Bed Every Time, a detached and wry intelligence that seems to let us watch from over its shoulder, smiling commiseratorially, but never quite telling us what it sees. The stories we witness here are often surprising, sometimes surreal, and frequently heartbreaking,…
How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, a story collection by Kate Bernheimer, reviewed by Allegra Hyde

In the title story of Kate Bernheimer’s latest collection, How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, we encounter a universe where dolls talk and little girls receive trays of lollipops and jelly beans as nighttime snacks. A universe, it would seem, of childhood fantasy. And yet, as with the other stories in the…
Mira Corpora, a novel by Jeff Jackson, reviewed by Kyle Coma-Thompson

“These days I’m on a need-to-know basis with myself.” Two-thirds of the way into Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora, the novel’s narrator makes this brief, rare admission of self-awareness. It could also serve as a statement of purpose and description of a method. Reading like the remains of a novel, the leftovers of a trauma narrative…
Kimonos in the Closet, poems by David Shumate, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

Organized in thematic clusters, the poems in David Shumate’s Kimonos in the Closet are poems of exchange—cultural, historical, mythological, and personal. Shumate has long occupied a prominent place in the world of prose poetry, but his prose poems ring differently from those of other practitioners of the form. They do not often systematically derange the…
The Fatherlands, prose poems by Michael Trocchia, reviewed by Nick Kocz

I thought often of the surrealist painters of the last century—specifically, Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico—while reading The Fatherlands, Michael Trocchia’s brooding chapbook of thirty-three Roman-numbered prose poems. The opening piece, with its evocation of “a time when the hours themselves will be melted down for the glass of transparent death” brings to mind…
“Authenticity and Alienation”: Dennis B. Ledden on Jim Daniels’ Birth Marks

Although the title of this new superb collection by Jim Daniels, the award-winning author of thirteen previous books of poetry, may very well be a reference to the poems themselves, we may also speculate that his title refers to the nature of his experiences while growing up in 1960s/70s Detroit and to the alienation that…
Kelsie Hahn Reviews Twilight of the Wolves, a novel by edward j rathke

edward j rathke’s novel Twilight of the Wolves opens with a boy digging graves. He is alone. Everyone he knows is dead, consumed by a war that will engulf cities, peoples, a continent. It has already consumed his heart. Or so it appears: By the first nightfall, he no longer cried. By morning his lips…
Theories of Forgetting, a novel by Lance Olsen, reviewed by Joe Sacksteder

It’s cliché for reviewers to use the phrase “a _______ experience like no other.” When the experience is a reading experience, what the reviewer usually means is that the plot/characters/setting/language are particularly compelling/unique/distinctive/bold. In other words—if you read good books—an experience like quite a lot of others. But Lance Olsen’s novel Theories of Forgetting reminds…
The Static Herd, a novel by Beth Steidle, reviewed by Allegra Hyde

How do we write about death? Explain the inexplicable without sounding overwrought, cliché, false? Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps we avoid it, dance around it, mask it in metaphor until any real substance is lost. If this is the case, we might take direction from Beth Steidle, whose recent novel, The Static Herd, addresses the paradox…