Category: Reviews & Criticism

Nonfiction Review: Annie Diamond Reads Renata Golden’s Essayed Field Guide Mountain Time

In Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, Renata Golden challenges assumptions about both the natural world and well-known human histories. She begins her essay collection by weaving together the narratives of her ancestors, Irish immigrants who came to the United States after the Potato Famine (to which Golden refers as An Gorta Mór, the…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Looks at Orchid Tierney’s Mad Lichen on the Surfaces of Reading

Orchid Tierney’s beautifully composed essay looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading is like a musical piece that takes a handful of motifs from a previously existing work and resets them, interweaves them, varies them, and develops them into something new and distinctly its own. For Tierney the previously existing work…
Nonfiction Review: Kevin McMahon Reads Margaret Nowaczyk’s Essay Collection Marrow Memory

One could eschew social media, send postcards, and buy groceries with cash, and still never truly avoid the digitally isolating modern world. Despite the convenience and ubiquity of FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, it’s hard to argue that humans have ever been so removed from one other. In the span of less than a generation, we’ve…
“A Sensitive and Insightful Reflection on a Life Well Lived”: Atlanta Tsiaoukkas Reads Fancy Feast’s Essay Collection Naked

Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques is an essay collection and memoir by veteran burlesque performer Fancy Feast, and draws on her broad and rich experiences to create a thoughtful narrative that carries valuable insights for both the burlesque virgins and stalwarts of the profession. The sheer breadth of anecdotes Feast is able to…
Poetry Review: Matt Martinson Reads Ann Jäderlund’s Collection Lonespeech

Have you heard that a fallout between two philosophers can make national, frontpage news in France? That writing quality poetry could earn you a place of political power in Ancient China? That Vaclav Havel’s absurdist plays helped land him the role of president when Yugoslavia emerged from the Soviet Union’s shadow? Well, here’s one more…
“Put Me in (the Annals of History and Then Some), Coach”: Nicole Yurcaba Reviews Charles Holdefer’s Story Collection Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic

Before the Russians were known for Vladimir Putin, Kremlin propaganda, and an imperialistic streak that has in the last century made many raise an eyebrow, they were—perhaps—the creators of the sport that would become known as “America’s pastime.” And who knew Babe Ruth and Gertrude Stein were such good friends—so much so that they switched…
Nonfiction Review: Hollay Ghadery Reads Pamela Mulloy’s Essay Collection Off the Tracks

There are a handful of books I’ve read that truly enchanted me. Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy is one of them. Even now, weeks after finishing the book, I can recall the momentum: the sway between drugged calm and startled curiosity I experienced…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Emily Greenberg’s Collection of Alternative Facts

Midway through Emily Greenberg’s breakout collection, Alternative Facts, is a story titled “Lost in the Desert of the Real,” which begins with theorist Jean Baudrillard’s description of how images are degraded from being reflections of profound reality to simulacrums of themselves, self-referentiality with no external connection. It is a common enough danger of our media-infested…
Fiction Review: S. D. Stewart Reads Ansgar Allen’s Novel The Faces of Pluto

Imagine the vast number of words written over the past 5,000 years, since the invention of writing and beginning of recorded human history. Many were written in attempts to explain the world in which the writers lived at the time. Now think about how many of these interpretations have since been labeled as incorrect—whether due…