Category: Reviews & Criticism

Poetry Review: Kimberly Swendson Reads Maria Hardin’s Debut Collection cute girls watch when i eat aether

pulling at the hem of time unraveling my self in the process there is no health you whisper only livingmy sick sick rose A sick, sick rose is Maria Hardin’s perennial calling card in her debut poetry collection, cute girls watch when I eat aether. The poems of this collection drag along the soft and…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joe Koch’s Story Collection Invaginies

Over the past few years, as I’ve delved further into indie and experimental literature and been exposed to the dazzling array of queer writers thriving therein, I’ve discovered something of a bad habit in myself—a tendency to automatically read as-yet-unidentified narrators as the same gender as their authors. I’ve been caught with my comprehensive pants…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads Lauren Scharhag’s Collection Ain’t These Sorrows Sweet

In Lauren Scharhag’s collection Ain’t These Sorrows Sweet she succeeds in giving voice to “15,000 years” of ancestors, to the elders who forget how to draw clocks but whose names chime in music boxes, to the young nieces now mothers and mothers now childless, to the blood which flows within her and too easily out…
“A Trek through Working-Class Pennsylvania”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Scott Dimovitz’s Novel The Joy Divisions

In Scott Dimovitz’s novel The Joy Divisions, Allentown, Pennsylvania, is not merely a geographic location or the novel’s setting. Yes, it is a place, but in Dimovitz’s book, Allentown is a living breathing entity, a character with a life and experiences entirely its own. The Joy Divisions draws on Allentown’s rich history as Pennsylvania’s third…
Nonfiction Review: Alex Gurtis Reads Mike Nagel’s Post-Capitalist Americana Memoir Culdesac

Mike Nagel made waves in indie lit circles in 2022 when he published his popular debut Duplex with Autofocus Books, a book about alcoholism, the pandemic, and life within the walls of his Texas duplex complete with photographs. Two years later, his follow-up, Culdesac, promises more of the same: dark humor, witty takes, photographs of…
Poetry Review: Lauren Scharhag Reads Scott Ferry & Daniel McGinn’s Call-and-Response Fill Me with Birds

In some ways, Scott Ferry & Daniel McGinn’s Fill Me with Birds sneaks up on you. Ferry’s poems are usually brief, less than a page, with spare lines that eschew such trifles as capitalization and punctuation. McGinn’s work can be longer, but his straightforward, matter-of-fact style lulls you into a false sense of security. Make…
Chapbook Review: olga mikolaivna Reads Aditi Kini’s Notes, Jokes, and Queries Oriental Cyborg

Aditi Kini’s debut chapbook and winner of the 2021 Essay Press Chapbook Prize, Oriental Cyborg, is material but also imaginary—as in, image based, as in, an invention. As in, an invention with material repercussions. Under cyborg operatics the body is an invention for labor and to toll away: specifically a body coded in, and of,…
Fiction Review: Josh Massey Reads Daniel Beauregard’s Anti-Novel Lord of Chaos

The title Lord of Chaos sounds like an entry from the metal canon, and then Daniel Beauregard’s online persona, which you can get glimpses of on X, does hint at a kind of metal aesthetic—perhaps that’s the scene in the author’s current home of Buenos Aires? The city sounds like a South American literature mecca,…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads M.J. Nicholls’ Collection Violent Solutions to Popular Problems

Remember learning about the so-called death of the author, that brief moment where, in the world of literature, authorial biography—to say nothing of intent—did not matter in the least? If I’m being honest, I sometimes find myself missing the playfulness of the postmodern old guard, which feels as if it has been entirely replaced with…