Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a novel by Matt Bell, reviewed by Patrick Trotti
Matt Bell’s latest offering, published by Soho Press, is his most ambitious to date. In many ways it represents his continued growth as a writer. Moving from the shorter forms (short story collection, chapbooks, and novellas) of his past Bell has put together a novel-length work that may very well be his best writing yet.…
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On an Ungrounded Earth, new philosophy by Ben Woodard, reviewed by David Peak
In a 2011 interview conducted by Bookfriendzy, when asked about why he started his multi-disciplinary journal Collapse, Robin Mackay said (and I’m doing my best to transcribe here), “There were a number of problems that it was designed to address, one of which is the problem of where philosophy can exist outside of the academic…
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A Questionable Shape, a postmodern horror novel by Bennett Sims, reviewed by Michael Goroff
Bennett Sims’ debut novel, A Questionable Shape, is a cornucopia of postmodern stimulation. A “zombie novel” that utilizes footnotes to reference Freud, David Chalmers, Goldeneye (the video game), Heidegger, Oedipus Rex, Nietzsche, Joyce’s “The Dead” (or, as Sims’ narrator muses, “The Undead”) Solaris (both the Tarkovsky original and the Soderbergh remake), and Hurricane Katrina, among…
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Sign You Were Mistaken, poetry by Seth Landman, reviewed by Ezekiel Black
In my initial reading of Sign You Were Mistaken, I experienced a sensation that I’ve never associated with poetry before. When I drive—and I assume that this happens to everyone—I zone out, and when I regain consciousness, there is the satisfaction of abridging my commute, given that I was only aware for a portion of…
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Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, poetry by Laura Read, reviewed by Kate Kimball
What if the only compass you had to the past was a series of fragmented images of home? What shape would these images take? What sound? After assembling what you could, how would you determine a beginning, middle, or end? And later, after stepping back, what would be real and what would be imagined? What…
Heavy Feather Review 