Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
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…
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…