Category: Reviews & Criticism

Dear Lil Wayne, epistolary poems by Lauren Ireland, reviewed by Daniel M. Shapiro

Although the epistolary poem has been around since the Roman Empire, it has taken a new turn with the advent of social media. Nowadays, the subjects of letters are much easier to reach; poets don’t need to be as hypothetical in communication. If we like Kevin Bacon’s performance in last night’s episode of The Following,…
Deep Ellum, a novel by Brandon Hobson, reviewed by Coleen Muir

Deep Ellum, by Brandon Hobson, follows our twenty-something-year-old narrator, Gideon, through the streets of Deep Ellum, a gloomy district in Dallas, Texas, which he has returned to after his mother’s suicide attempt. During his return, he must grapple with his sister, Meg’s, drug use and her mysterious and possibly abusive relationship with a man named…
Lake of Earth, prose by William VanDenBerg, reviewed by David Peak

The cover image of Lake of Earth shows a gemstone—its surface angled, smooth, brilliant—that seems to contain an inner light, something Machen might have imagined as harboring a human soul. This gemstone can also be seen as being representative of VanDenBerg’s crystal-clear, lean prose. Take, for example, this brief excerpt from the story “Wife of…
Book Review: m. forajter on Nicole Wilson’s Poetry Collection Supper & Repair Kit

What is a body? A person? How do we form identities when we exist in bodies we didn’t choose? How do we live when our identities clash so painfully with what the world expects us to be? How do we live when things continually happen to us? Both a reflection of body and of the…
Tribute, a fragmentary narrative by Anne Germanacos, reviewed by Bayard Godsave

There is a certain type of writing which asks us to engage with it so that the reader must become an active participant. The reader gives over and becomes writer as well. Call it a kind of collaborative reading, or call it, as Roland Barthes did, a writerly text. Tribute by Anne Germanacos is the…
Motherfucking Sharks, a novel by Brian Allen Carr, reviewed by Brett Beach

A stranger comes to town. We know this story, don’t we? He warns of approaching danger, which the townspeople ignore. And because we are familiar with this story, we know the tale will not have a happy ending for most. The stranger—crazy or haunted, ill and raving—is right. Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks is a…
Commercial Fiction, stories by Dave Housley, reviewed by Nicholas Grider

Dave Housley’s Commercial Fiction is exactly what the title suggests, in two senses of the term. First, it’s literally short fiction that curls itself around standard network TV commercials, with anything from Taco Bell to Cialis given the brief 3D space of psychologically complex characters, many of whom, beneath the plywood façade of the commercial,…
Praying Drunk, stories by Kyle Minor, reviewed by Jeremy Hauck

In Praying Drunk, his second book following In the Devil’s Territory (Dzanc Books, 2008), Kyle Minor forays beyond the realm of literary realist fiction and into conceptual work even as he makes hay from the material that literary fiction has monopolized: suicide, cancer/terminal illness, lives changed irrevocably by events lasting only seconds, travel to the…
Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, rejection letters by Lee Klein, reviewed by Nichole L. Reber

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck collects a decade’s worth of pithy, humorous rejection letters sent to writers who hoped to publish in Lee Klein’s self-proclaimed “semi-literary” online journal, Eyeshot. This is not the stuff of “We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but we’ve decided not to publish …” No, these rejections are…