Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
Nonfiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Jessie van Eerden’s Essay Collection Yoke & Feather

Yoke & Feather, an essay collection by Jessie van Eerden, reaches toward grace, in the deepest sense of that word. That grace is sometimes the grace of a Christian god, yes, but van Eerden more often looks for the grace to be found between people while we wait for that God to show up. Her…
Poetry Review: Rina Shamilov Reads Azad Ashim Sharma’s Collection Boiled Owls

The tenderness of Boiled Owls allows for an exchange of lamentation and suffering (albeit of a different kind) between the poem’s speaker and those he loves. The poems revive memory and depict the process of overcoming addiction’s grip: “I needed to justify my experience without someone else’s voice, but as I said, I’ve got no…
New Criticism: “Four Ways Poetry Predicted the Internet” by Joanna Fuhrman

“There are poets like John Ashbery for whom the internet seems to have been invented for who probably never sent an email” —William Lessard, from an email When I started writing Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about digital life, it was not because I had anything to add to the debate about how…
Fiction Review: Gabriel Welsch Reads Benjamin Drevlow’s Story Collection Honky

Not quite equal parts nonfiction and fiction, the stories in Honky show the life of a young man growing up white and poor in rural “Northernass Wisconsin” who then moves to “Southernass Georgia” as an adult. His enthusiasm for spaces that, in the years he was growing up, were closely associated with Black culture—basketball and…
“Transformations in Unknowable Ways”: John Schertzer Reads John Madera’s Story Collection Nervosities

Nervosities, John Madera’s distinctive and expansive new story collection, may be categorized as postmodern, since much of its reflexive concerns and critique align with post-1968 French philosophical questions, albeit without the pomo fizz and jizz of the 1990s pop-speculative agon. The stories also betray a deep proclivity for the best of Modernism, e.g., formal and…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Vi Khi Nao’s Novel The Italy Letters

The epistolary form has been standard in literary fiction more or less since its inception. We’ve seen it done well and originally in authors like Ovid and Samuel Richardson, cleverly reimagined by folks like Mariama Ba, Julie Schumacher, Roberto Bolano, and Calvin Kasulke. In fact, I’ve seen it done so well, and in so many…