Category: Reviews & Criticism

“River on Fire”: Alex Gurtis Reads Darren C. Demaree’s New Poetry Collection So Much More

Darren C. Demaree’s latest collection, So Much More, feels particularly relevant in a year of political upheaval. So Much More is constructed around a series of abstracts, fragments, and political prose poems that deconstruct toxic landscapes disintegrating through the violence of human greed while addressing the fears of passing this world on to the next…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads George Franklin’s Collection What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused

In reading some poetry collections one is immediately overwhelmed with the narrative and drawn in. Many such books are so intricate and complete in creating their own self-sustaining world that it is almost impossible to describe this microcosm to an outsider. George Franklin has written such a book and now I have taken on the…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads GauZ’s Novel Comrade Papa

“Everything here needs to be invented, beginning with ourselves,” so says a European colonizer on the Ivory coast early in Comrade Papa, but he may as well be describing every character in this, the second book by GauZ’ to be translated into English. Here two characters, generations apart, narrate their respective experiences of coming of…
“Onward, Sabine”: Nicole Yurcaba Reviews Ella Baxter’s Novel Woo Woo

Ella Baxter first wowed us with her debut novel New Animal, a darkly humorous exploration of grief’s deepest nooks and crannies and a young woman’s adventures into the BDSM scene. In 2024, Baxter returns to the literary scene with yet another thrilling, eccentric novel—Woo Woo. Woo Woo follows Sabine, an uninhibited and unconventional artist whose…
Poetry Review: Carole Mertz Reads Zilka Joseph’s Collection Sweet Malida

Zilka Joseph’s Sweet Malida focuses on a fascinating and little-known segment of Jewish history. Her topic is the Jewish community of her ancestors and of her immediate family. To learn of a group of travelers having survived as an intact sect within the vast populace of so vast a subcontinent as India, was, to me,…
Fiction Review: Adam Janos Tunnels through Ben Segal’s New Novel

Stories, unlike real life, make sense. In a well-told story, choices have consequences: Pinocchio tells a lie, and so his nose gets longer. But our waking lives are shaped by countless forces, and so it’s impossible to figure out what’s causing what. Have I been fighting with my girlfriend because I hate my job? Or…
Nonfiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Jessie van Eerden’s Essay Collection Yoke & Feather

Yoke & Feather, an essay collection by Jessie van Eerden, reaches toward grace, in the deepest sense of that word. That grace is sometimes the grace of a Christian god, yes, but van Eerden more often looks for the grace to be found between people while we wait for that God to show up. Her…
Poetry Review: Rina Shamilov Reads Azad Ashim Sharma’s Collection Boiled Owls

The tenderness of Boiled Owls allows for an exchange of lamentation and suffering (albeit of a different kind) between the poem’s speaker and those he loves. The poems revive memory and depict the process of overcoming addiction’s grip: “I needed to justify my experience without someone else’s voice, but as I said, I’ve got no…
New Criticism: “Four Ways Poetry Predicted the Internet” by Joanna Fuhrman

“There are poets like John Ashbery for whom the internet seems to have been invented for who probably never sent an email” —William Lessard, from an email When I started writing Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about digital life, it was not because I had anything to add to the debate about how…