Category: Reviews & Criticism

The Moon’s Jaw, poetry by Rauan Klassnik, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

I’m trying to figure out what they call the synopsis wherein each big event is separated by a dash at the beginning of a novel’s chapters. You know what I’m talking about? Like in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Childhood in Tennessee – Runs away – New Orleans – Fights – Is shot – To Galveston…
Dark Matter, poetry by Aase Berg, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

One contracts and soon succumbs to Dark Matter more than one begins to read it; no matter how this review begins, a cursory tracing of infection patterns would be more suitable. Recurrent throughout this latest translation of Aase Berg’s poetry is the image of the black shell, which might be a cracking, hatching chaosmic egg,…
“Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives”: A Reflection by Joseph Riippi

Some things you should know about me. The day a new Radiohead record comes out, I buy it. The day a new Aaron Sorkin show premieres, I watch it. And the day a new Aleksandar Hemon book is announced, I find a galley and devour it. That’s not to say those things correlate. This is…
Review: Louise Henrich on ANIMAL collection, a fantastical zoo trip by Colin Winnette

Instead of speaking about the trunk of an elephant or the way an elephant moves, Colin Winnette begins his story by reminding the reader “an elephant never forgets,” but gives the common aphorism a sinister angle: Never owe an ELEPHANT money. It will make a point of humiliating you. It will find you on public…
A Review of Andrew Rihn’s The Hunger Dictionary by Lisa M. Litrenta

In The Hunger Dictionary Andrew Rihn defines the numerous types of hunger one can feel when a romantic relationship falls apart. In these poems, Rihn’s narrator is hungry to communicate with a closed-off partner. The Hunger Dictionary serves as the narrator’s first opportunity to identify and evaluate the problems in the relationship. When I think…
A Review of Daniel Romo’s When Kerosene’s Involved by Jordan Sanderson

Direct and accessible, the poems in When Kerosene’s Involved blaze with memory. As the title suggests, fire is a common motif in the book, but it kindles in unexpected places. While the tone remains steady throughout the collection, Romo creates several personae, alludes to a broad range of pop culture icons—often reimagining them in other…
Michael J Seidlinger Reviews Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia: A Biography of Place

“It’s a story full of death and dying, living and life, tits and ass and balls and dicks and pussy. It’s an old, old, old story that always begins—they begat and they begat and they begat.” It is every story; or, in the case of Crapalachia, Scott McClanahan’s latest, it is the story of family,…
Cassandra Gillig Reviews My Pet Serial Killer, a novel by Michael J Seidlinger

My Pet Serial Killer’s hyper-hip cover and cutesy name (a My Little Pony-quality endearment, tried and true) do a poor job of preparing the reader for the grotesqueries which will bombard him or her throughout. Set against a backdrop of clubbing and collegiate education, Seidlinger’s story revolves around Claire, a young female grad student, who…
Joshua Kleinberg Review: Long Division, poetry by Alan Michael Parker

The title of Alan Michael Parker’s most recent collection, Long Division, reveals a dialogic tension that the twenty-first century poet can’t help but consider—if not in his poems, then certainly in his heart. Parker’s recurring discussion of simple mathematical concepts, in poems such as “The Biologist from Pennsylvania” and “Family Math,” takes on the surprisingly…