Category: Reviews & Criticism

“When the Horrors at Home Are Scarier Than Any Monsters”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Darrin Doyle’s Novel Let Gravity Seize the Dead

Darrin Doyle’s Let Gravity Seize the Dead invites us into a new kind of psychological horror, one that relies on brevity and compression to create the subtle scare tactics that keep us engrossed. Within the novel’s 141 pages, we uncover a trauma-laden story that examines the past, the present, and the myriad of ways one…
Poetry Review: Gina Thayer Reads Jenny Irish’s Poetry Collection Hatch

If you were to open my copy of Jenny Irish’s prose poetry collection, Hatch, you would find margins filled with penciled half-thoughts and doodles of anatomically dubious fireflies. I’m not usually one to mark up a book, but Hatch works in mysterious ways, subtly shifting how we interact with the world. Through linked prose poems…
Fiction Review: Adam McPhee Reads Scott Mitchel May’s Novel Awful People

A reunion of a group of friends looms on the horizon of Awful People, the new novel by Scott Mitchel May. The friends, whose lives once loosely revolved around employment at the Antiquated Brewing Company in Madison, Wisconsin, haven’t seen each other since 2009, their ties shattered after one of their number developed LSD-induced telekinetic…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Rikki Ducornet’s Novella The Plotinus

Forget “Call me Ishamel” and try on this opening line instead: “Agitated and pressed for time, I grabbed the knobby stick—a harmless memento of the footpath—now long gone—that had for a time provided access to the woods (such as they were) and ran into the street unprepared for the inevitable encounter (such a dope!) with…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ben Tanzer’s Novel The Missing

Parenthood can be rife with worst case scenarios, all of them truly the worst. It’s a state I was blissfully unaware of when I was a young father still set in youth’s phase of invincibility, but now that I’m a grandfather, I often worry about higher stakes. All those potential worst cases now hovering around…
“A Field Guide to Our Precarious Hive”: Robert Glick Reads Shena McAuliffe’s Short Story Collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness

Shena McAuliffe’s third book, the inventive and quietly powerful story collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness, acts as a field guide to characters who devote themselves to systems of belief—a business model, a pseudo-science, a taxonomy of the body—at odds with their lived conditions. The friction between the imaginary and the real, however, isn’t particularly…
“The ‘secret / undulating form’ of Erin Marie Lynch’s Collection Removal Acts”: A Poetry Review by Michael Collins

Drawing its title from the American legislation promulgating the severing of multiple Native American nations from their homes, Erin Marie Lynch’s debut collection deeply inhabits psychological tensions of the sort that those who undertook the original Removal Acts could not. A Dakota descendant, Lynch’s perspectives on this legacy are also informed, in part, by the…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Richard Loranger’s Collection Mammal

The latest poetry collection from multi-genre writer, performer, and artist Richard Loranger should be read aloud whenever possible. It is fit for the acoustics of any space: an outdoor park, a busy street corner, commercial flights, bars, art galleries. In one moment, the work jets out lines of willful cacophony: “a beaming lump of ectoplasm…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Matthew Baker’s Graphic Novel The Sentence

In Matthew Baker’s The Sentence, the new government of the United States is a military dictatorship that executes dissenters and displays their rotting bodies on the steps of the Supreme Court, with a soldier posted to shoot any vultures that fly too near. The methods of execution are creatively gruesome in the way of speculative…