Category: Reviews & Criticism

Comics Review: Jason Teal Reads Olivier Schrauwen’s Graphic Novel about His Cousin Thibault’s Sunday

How many Sundays did it take me to finally write about the new graphic novel from Olivier Schrauwen, Sunday? Get up ah. According to the calendar, this is my 21st Sunday with the book, and I think that in itself deserves some kind of award: like Olivier’s cousin Thibault I have not traveled very far…
Poetry Review: Tiffany Troy Reads Daniel Lawless’ Collection I Tell You This Now

I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless invites us into an intimate viewing of family albums and photography from the Polio Ward in Louisville, Kentucky, 1943-47. As a lookback at when the dead were still living and the hurt that remains in the aftermath of domestic violence and sexual abuse, this viewing is necessary…
Fiction Review: Eric Z. Weintraub Reads Jordan A. Rothacker’s Novel The Shrieking of Nothing

Jordan A. Rothacker’s sixth novel, The Shrieking of Nothing, marks his first venture into sequel territory, returning us to the futuristic world of RESURGA (23rd-century Atlanta) and the detective duo Assistant Sacred Detective Edwina Casaubon and Sacred Detective Rabbi Jakob “Thinkowitz” Rabbinowitz, who first appeared in Rothacker’s 2020 novel, The Death of the Cyborg Oracle.…
Comics Review: Sarah Shermyen Reads Xiang Yata’s Graphic Novel Optometry

“Graphic novel” or “graphic narrative” have become the terms used to describe comic books with a literary bent. I’ve always insisted on calling them comics, but Optometry really is a graphic novel, narrative, because it is a story of images and visuals. This book is not so much light on words as it largely functions…
“Cheers to the Weirdos! Trinity”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2024

Here we go again! Putting together this year brings me such joy and I hope you find something beautiful here, too. Sometimes, it can seem as if no one reads anymore but making this list reassures me that there are a lot of us out there, still trying to learn, still trying to create, still…
Poetry Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Aditi Machado’s Collection Material Witness

You should read Aditi Machado. You should read everything she writes—I am on that path myself, but I’m only two books in, so we can race each other if you start now. Her new collection, Material Witness, is short. It contains six poems, two of which take up more pages than their word count might…
“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…