Category: Reviews & Criticism
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the shared properties of water and stars, poetry by Kristy Bowen, reviewed by M. Forajter
Kristy Bowen’s newest poetry collection, the shared properties of water and stars, tells the story of trapped people. Told in interconnected prose poems that look and feel like the pages of a miniature story book, Bowen creates a poetic landscape for which her fairy tale archetypes may play. Set in an idyllic suburbia, Bowen’s characters…
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This Darksome Burn, a novella by Nick Ripatrazone, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt
Maybe, before I start talking about This Darksome Burn proper, I’ll touch on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Inversnaid,” from which Nick Ripatrazone’s novella takes its title. The poem takes a straightforward Romantic approach to nature as scene of the sublime revelation. To quote William Cronon from “The Trouble with Wilderness,” sublime landscapes were those rare places…
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Book Review: Misha Rai on Woke Up Lonely, a novel by Fiona Maazel
Espionage with its usual mayhem of shady deals, body suits a la Tom Cruise in various productions of Mission Impossible, misunderstood cult leaders, communes, clubs with speed dating masquerading as confessionals, North Korea, Cincinnati vice uncovered literally under the city’s ground all make their nefarious presence felt in Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely. In Maazel’s…
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All We Want Is Everything, stories by Andrew F. Sullivan, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn
Andrew F. Sullivan’s debut collection, All We Want Is Everything, revolves around characters who started off badly and have been trapped in a steep decline ever since. The cast predominantly features characters who are down on their luck, struggling working class, or both. These are characters who experience powerlessness. They enact violence, and violence is…
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Sam Price on Chelsea Martin’s Even Though I Don’t Miss You: “Love Songs Are Always Written in Solitude”
And good poems are often written from bad places. This book of poems by Chelsea Martin is both a re-examination of a failed relationship and a kind of addendum. Martin’s protagonist isn’t working to get the last word like a selfish lover hoping to exonerate herself, but more like a sociologist interested in her behavior…
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Colony Collapse, fiction by J.A. Tyler, reviewed by Kate Kimball
“I started the search for my brother by building a house,” the narrator begins in J.A. Tyler’s book of prose, Colony Collapse. And, though the narrator starts his search with building, he also burns, demolishes, and rebuilds. It is through these actions that the reader is able to enter the strange, dreamlike, and disembodied world…
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How We Light, poetry by Nick Sturm, reviewed by Dillon J. Welch
“ … I haven’t even opened my copy of Nick Sturm’s How We Light because he is one of those rare poets that terrify me. I get terrified because I know as soon as I start reading I’ll be his, I’ll be within his vocal set, and it will take weeks to get out, to…
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Swamp Isthmus, poetry by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, reviewed by Ally Harris
Illuminated by “lampmatch,” Swamp Ithsmus is poems of the inevitability of fleeting encounters in a foggy suburban landscape. Though assuredly more subtle than the way I’ve articulated it, all the women in Ithsmus have already stood from the bed by the time I discern their silhouette, and it is in that space between two people…
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Tampa, a novel by Alissa Nutting, reviewed by Erin McKnight
Amid the hype for this eagerly awaited and in some cases already reviled summer release, the reader launching into Tampa may as well be Alissa Nutting’s pathological protagonist readying for her first day of teaching. The difference is that the reader will surely not prepare by means of “an excited loop of hushed masturbation” beside…
Heavy Feather Review 