Category: Reviews & Criticism

  • Fondly, two novellas by Colin Winnette, reviewed by Ben Spivey

    Fondly, two novellas by Colin Winnette, reviewed by Ben Spivey

    When Fondly arrived in the mail I tore open the package and stared at the cover for a second, looked at the back and thought, Yes that is an exploding face. I did not know what to expect from this book. I quickly found out that Fondly was not just a single book but two…

  • Any Deadly Thing, stories by Roy Kesey, reviewed by Ryan Werner

    Any Deadly Thing, stories by Roy Kesey, reviewed by Ryan Werner

    Sometimes I remember that the world is big. I remember this in the context of thinking about how the world is often small. In reading Roy Kesey’s short story collection Any Deadly Thing, I thought often of the places his characters go, both geographically and emotionally. This idea of distance takes the reader to South…

  • The Skin Team, a novel by Jordaan Mason, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

    The Skin Team, a novel by Jordaan Mason, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

    Jordaan Mason’s The Skin Team is designed to strike—at first—as a coming of age story circa Perks of Being a Wallflower or The Fuck-Up. There’s riding bicycles, there’s reading diaries, eating licorice, hanging out in treehouses, following train tracks, sharing the first cigarette, sharing clothes, cutting. There’s ample surreptitious teenage sex on mattresses in the woods.…

  • STALL, collaborative poetry by Shane Anderson & Elvia Wilk, reviewed by David Peak

    STALL, collaborative poetry by Shane Anderson & Elvia Wilk, reviewed by David Peak

    “Every thought is already over.” This line occurs fairly early on in Elvia Wilk and Shane Anderson’s fantastic collaborative chapbook, STALL—and it should be read partly as an instruction for how to proceed through these weird and tumbling poems and partly as a clue that nothing should ever make too much sense. On the publisher’s…

  • “DRM—Murdering the Reader, or Why Informed Reading is Good,” a technologically-minded essay by Zach Tarvin

    “DRM—Murdering the Reader, or Why Informed Reading is Good,” a technologically-minded essay by Zach Tarvin

    In March, a reboot of SimCity was met with an outcry from PC gamers around the world. The game, which requires a constant, high-speed Internet connection, was more or less unplayable. SimCity publisher Electronic Arts (EA) blamed the slow-down on the massively multiplayer aspects of the game. Their servers couldn’t handle the demand—an issue that,…

  • Portuguese, poetry by Brandon Shimoda, reviewed by Nathan Moore

    Portuguese, poetry by Brandon Shimoda, reviewed by Nathan Moore

    Brandon Shimoda’s Portuguese is the result of a collaborative publishing venture between Octopus Books and Tin House Books. From this information alone, you’d be right to expect something that, at the very least, is interesting. Portuguese is not only interesting, it defines new expectations about poetry. Now I expect more from poetry. There’s the “Oh,…

  • You Good Thing, a new poetry collection by Dara Wier, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    You Good Thing, a new poetry collection by Dara Wier, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    Reading Dara Wier’s You Good Thing, I felt “physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” not only on the first read, but also on each subsequent read. She begins the book with a sketch and an epigraph—“by the longest route possible”—taken from a photographic biography of Fernando Pessoa. The poems do…

  • One, a text by Blake Butler & Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. Reviewed by Will Kaufman.

    One, a text by Blake Butler & Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. Reviewed by Will Kaufman.

    One is perhaps most notable for what it is; a unique collaboration between three writers. Blake Butler and Vanessa Place were assigned the tasks, respectively, of writing the exterior landscape and interior landscape of a single character. They were not allowed to collaborate or communicate at all with each other about their projects. Once they…

  • Review: F IN, erasure poetry by Carol Guess, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

    Review: F IN, erasure poetry by Carol Guess, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

    At first, Carol Guess’ F IN draws attention to what’s missing. Its pages are mostly empty, as it is the parts that remain from Guess’ novella Willful Machine after being cut down to a scattering of words and phrases. The original was a mystery, including ghosts and the investigation and pursuit of a crime. This…