Category: Reviews & Criticism

My One Square Inch of Alaska, a novel by Sharon Short, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler

There was a time, in the not too distant past a pernicious form of lexical sexism permeated the bookshelves. It constituted a whole different version of putting women in their place. By this I mean, their place on that self-same bookshelf. It went something like this: Tales where the protagonist was a male adolescent, i.e.…
Reluctant Mistress, poetry by Anne Champion, reviewed by Hannah Baker-Siroty

Anne Champion’s Reluctant Mistress is a beautiful first book of poetry that, like the best first books, possesses a rawness and vulnerability to it. Though there are many themes here, I believe the best developed are desire, femininity, and this notion of somehow being a runner-up. Reluctant Mistress begins with the poem “Words,” offering us…
Solecism, poetry by Rosebud Ben-Oni, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

Rosebud Ben-Oni’s opening salvo for her poetry collection Solecism, released this year from Virtual Artists Collective, At ten, I held the look of locust and mothers of tarp and tinheld closer their unborn in the streets of childpits. At ten, the Americans came and built a factory for the womento work with solvents and a…
Murmuration, a fiction chapbook by Ryan Werner, reviewed by Austin Hayden

Ryan Werner’s Murmuration sort of creeps out from the distance like the starlings in the title story—you’ll see. These five stories are sneaky glimpses into what folks call “teenage angst” (but what actually overlaps into your twenties, sticks around for thirty, et cetera). He writes youth in a real way—in a backpack of your dad’s…
Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise, fiction by Justin Lawrence Daugherty, reviewed by Kate Kimball

“‘Why are we training Cerb to fight?’ ‘Because he needs to rediscover his nature.’ ‘What’s his nature?’ Cerb ripped open the dummy’s head. ‘This,’ dad said, pointing. I didn’t get it. I’d seen Cerb eat his own shit once. ‘Like the wolf. Or, like, whatever came before the wolf even.’” Thus begins the strange world…
Appetite, poetry by Aaron Smith, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

“You’ve waited / your whole life for them to miss you,” Aaron Smith writes in “After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong about the Sadness of Men Who Love Men.” Uttered in the aftermath of an acceptance that feels like an arrival, this declaration satisfies one of the many cravings in Appetite. Yet…
Don’t Kiss Me, short-short-fiction by Lindsay Hunter, reviewed by Will Kaufman

Lindsay Hunter is an amazing practitioner of the short-short-fiction, and her new collection, Don’t Kiss Me, has some truly staggering moments. She can make you hurt more in a few pages than most authors can in a novel. She can make you laugh, and she can strike you dumb with her language. The stories in…
David Peak Reviews The Devotional Poems by Joe Hall

In his 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, Ingmar Bergman famously portrayed a god in the form of a spider. The woman to whom the god appears, a young schizophrenic named Karin, initially reacts to the sight of the spider with horror—and then revulsion. After being administered a sedative, she calms and says, “I was…
The Saddest Place on Earth, poetry by Kathryn Mockler, reviewed by Kate Kimball

“Buddha signed up for Weight / Watchers after his doctor said / he was borderline diabetic,” Kathryn Mockler writes, only to continue with Buddha’s thoughts of wondering “if he could / get in trouble at Weight / Watchers […] if he / could get kicked out.” This illustrates the absurd world that Mockler investigates in…