Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
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…
Coleen Muir on I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, an essay collection by Jamie Iredell

Jamie Iredell’s I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, published by Future Tense Books, is a collection of nineteen essays that moves linearly from Iredell’s childhood to his early fatherhood. The pieces in this collection range from personal to intellectual, cultural, and political, and hover primarily over topics of body image, racism, sexism, drug…
The Tide King, a novel by Jen Michalski, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler

Magic and fantasy, the supra and the supernatural are having a good long run in modern fiction. I approve of blurred lines among genre but—grumpy cat impersonator that I am—nothing entrances me less than the promise that I shall be entranced. Because chances are I’m not going to be entranced by the magic of magic…
Brett Beach on The Old Priest, short stories by Anthony Wallace

“The state of New Jersey seems to be not much more than a gigantic strip mall.” This reflection comes near the end of Anthony Wallace’s The Old Priest, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2013. The collection’s final story turns a mythic eye to the recent past, when the state was a wild…
Safe House, a poetry chapbook by David Winter, reviewed by Emily Rose Larsen

Poet David Winter’s debut collection, Safe House is a svelte but fierce chapbook. The compilation’s title is honored throughout the text by the themes of misplaced intimacy, desire, and imprisonment. Winter creates a collection of poems that function as individual spaces of shelter or safety. Some prove to be faulty and some are ethereal. Past…
Contrapuntal, poetry by Christopher Kondrich, reviewed by Erin McKnight

Following in the artistic practice of combining melodies, Christopher Kondrich’s Contrapuntal sounds a textured tone. If music must be written to be best appreciated by others, a narrative crescendo establishes the counterpoint of this sonorous collection. Because what resounds is a symphony of inventiveness, Kondrich its assured conductor. None of the fifty-nine poems are titled;…