Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…