Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Review: Jordan Sanderson on Underlife and Portico, poetry by Michael Lynch
As I read Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico, I kept thinking about what another poet once told me: “Seamus Heaney’s poetry comes as close to pure sound as you can get and still make sense.” During the first read, I didn’t care what the poems were about; I simply reveled in the lush soundscape. However,…
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Review: Jillian M. Phillips on The Diegesis, a collaborative text by Chas Hoppe & Joshua Young
When reading The Diegesis by Chas Hoppe & Joshua Young, one has to know the definition of “diegesis” in order to fully appreciate it. This fantastic word is a style of (traditionally) fiction which presents an interior view of the world through the narrator’s experience. In this collaboration, the poets have taken this idea to…
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Review: Louise Henrich on Vampires in the Lemon Grove, short stories by Karen Russell
I think it would be a good idea, while reading Karen Russell’s newest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, to read the title of each story and hypothesize what the story might actually be about. Most likely you’ll be wrong, unless you think the title story is about vampires in the lemon grove, in which…
Heavy Feather Review 