Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Graphic Novel Review: Jesi Bender Reads Jon Macy’s Biography Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes

Why aren’t the women in Jon Macy’s graphic novel, Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes, more famous? Almost every female character in this visual biography was someone who I had never heard of or had only heard of in passing. I can guarantee the majority of Americans wouldn’t know their names. Why have we…
“Ma’am, This Is a Wendy’s”: Brittany Micka-Foos on the Everyday and the Existential in Katie Berta’s Poetry Collection Retribution Forthcoming

In Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, Retribution Forthcoming, nothing is sacred—and everything is. This earnest, probing collection interweaves the everyday with the metaphysical. From skincare to smartphone-scrolling to microwave entrees, Berta interrogates the mundane and the minute to expose the existential crisis simmering underneath. The result is a blurring of boundaries: a confluence of animal…
Poetry Review: Jesi Bender Reads Ae Hee Lee’s Collection Asterism

A gift of a dozen blue eggs. My father cracks one over the pan and provokes its yolk with a fork. Come and see—it doesn’t tear. I mutter a prayer: may my life be as tenacious. Asterism is the 2024 Dorset Prize winner, which is given to a full-length poetry manuscript each year by Tupelo Press. The…
Fiction Review: Bruce Overby Reads Ellen Birkett Morris’ Novel Beware the Tall Grass

In her wonderful debut story collection Lost Girls, EllenBirkett Morris delivered 17 stories that explore in heartrending prose both the vulnerability and the power of the feminine. In her debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, Birkett Morris maintains her focus on the feminine in the person of her protagonist, Eve Sloan, a new mother deeply…
Fiction Review: Mia Carroll Reads Wes Blake’s Novella-in-Flash Pineville Trace

In Pineville Trace, Wes Blake tells the story of Frank Russet, a former revival preacher who has escaped from a minimum-security prison in Kentucky, where he was being held as a con artist. As Frank and his feline companion named Buffalo journey west to freedom, Blake paints a triptych of the escapist—his newly forged existence…
Fiction Review: Aidan Loevlie Reads C.H. Hooks’ Second Novel Can’t Shake the Dust

With Can’t Shake the Dust, C.H. Hooks further demonstrates his dexterity with symbolism and paradox. His second novel examines fate and trauma through one family’s relationship to the dirt track. The story is narrated by 14-year-old “Little” Billy Lemon, his father “Wild” Bill, and his mother Nanny. From the first sentence, Little’s mind is on his…