Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“The Straightforward Prose of Ben Marcus?”: Daniel J. Cecil Reviews Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus
When I joined Versal back in 2010, I was curious what other editors at the journal were reading. I was most interested in what Robert Glick, my fiction editor was intrigued by, and in response to my asking he gave two suggestions: read the Collected Fictions of Borges (which he kindly gifted to me), and devour…
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My Dead, poetry by Amy Lawless, reviewed by Jillian M. Phillips
My Dead is a poetry collection that stays with you. This isn’t a book of poems that can be read individually and easily forgotten. Each piece is somehow connected to the others. Every turn of the page creates a new reason to revisit what you’ve read. The collection invites you to stay and ruminate on…
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Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, stories by Kelly Luce, reviewed by Molly Patterson
The title story of Kelly Luce’s beautiful, strange, and compact collection lives up to its promise: it’s a weird little thing in three parts, featuring a central character and magic and a Japanese backdrop. It is the oddest of the ten stories, or perhaps one of two that are spectacularly non-narrative. The other eight operate…
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The Next Monsters, a poetry collection by Julie Doxsee, reviewed by David Peak
Doxsee’s poems are shattered mirrors; they are fractured, jagged. If you stare at them long enough, you’ll uncover patterns in the chaos, hints of a larger image that was perhaps banished to a new and frightening dimension when the mirror was broken—like the big moment at the end of Prince of Darkness that leaves you…
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Frost in the Low Areas, poetry by Karen Skolfield, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
Frost in the Low Areas reads like a delightful conversation with someone who is so intelligent and perceptive that you don’t realize the profundity of it until she has dropped you off. Then, you find yourself noticing old fans, thinking about the proper way to hold a hand, and wondering whether a touch was a…
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Videotape, poetry by Andrew Zawacki, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt
The world is striated with trajectories, accelerations, projections and predictions in Andrew Zawacki’s Videotape. Clouds become metaphors for computations, extracted and processed patterns become a substrate for new randomness to sprout. “The damascene sky / is a lantern slide, clouds a collodian positive on glass” while “bonbon / wrappers strewn on the hedges / like…
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No Man’s Land, comics by Blexbolex, reviewed by Robert Loss
Because I’m writing this for “here” as opposed to “over there” in the world of comics criticism, I’ll let you in on a secret: no one can agree on what defines a comic. No one. Is it the words/pictures dynamic? Or is it really just pictures-in-sequence, because, come on, what takes up most of the…
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Partial List of People to Bleach, fictions by Gary Lutz, reviewed by Tanner Hadfield
“There’s nothing more to it than the fact that in every moment everything’s over all over again,” Gary Lutz tells Blake Butler in a recent interview. If you’ve read Gary Lutz before, you’ve probably just connected moments to sentences, which is quite keen. Nice work! Virtually every sentence in Partial List of People to Bleach…
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Infinity’s Jukebox, a fiction chapbook by Matthew Burnside, reviewed by Dan Townsend
In an early lecture James Joyce said the “human mind, as it looks forward and backward, attains an eternal state … taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” I don’t know if Matthew Burnside was thinking of Joyce when he titled his chapbook, but Infinity’s…
Heavy Feather Review 