Category: Reviews & Criticism

Lost in Space: A Father’s Journey There and Back Again, essays by Ben Tanzer, reviewed by Leesa Cross-Smith

I don’t read a lot of essay collections and I’m way pickier about the essays I read. I’ll pretty much read any work of fiction if it’s short enough, but essays, no. I wish I could explain exactly why or what it is, but I cannot. All I know is that when an essay is…
If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep, poems by Joe Wenderoth, reviewed by Ezekiel Black

When I was an undergraduate, I took an Introduction to Creative Writing class with Brian Henry. I took this class almost on a whim. I had thought about writing before, but I did not know much about contemporary letters, especially about how to write such poetry, fiction, etc. Brian Henry assigned Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s…
Nevers, fictions by Megan Martin, reviewed by Alex McElroy

In his first letter to Franz Kappus, Rainer Marie Rilke advises the young poet to decide, first and foremost, “Must I write?” Necessity is one of the simplest and most overlooked requirements for the writer; it is often taken for granted when the activity, writing, precedes its necessity. Megan Martin’s second collection, Nevers, a slim…
Robert Loss Reviews This One Summer, a young adult graphic novel by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki

Summer is float-time for some people, especially kids, and as This One Summer‘s pre-adolescent protagonist Rose says, “It feels good. Floating. It feels like flying.” But it’s worth noting that Rose clings to an inner-tube as she says this; no one can float forever, not safely, anyway. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s poignant graphic novel…
On the Street of Divine Love, new and selected poems by Barbara Hamby, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

Barbara Hamby’s On the Street of Divine Love is magnificent. Containing fifteen new poems and a distillation of her previous four collections, it should secure her place among the best American poets. Hamby is the master of the contemporary ode, many of which are included here, and the collection as a whole is an ode…
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…