Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Kevin McMahon Reads Hollay Ghadery’s Debut Novel The Unravelling of Ou

In her debut novel, Hollay Ghadery blends a refreshingly unique premise with a natural gift for voice, delivery, and cutting straight and deep, deftly exploring the roots of grief and pain, internalized shame, isolation, and self-disregard. In tracing these headwaters, she reveals how we make it all bearable, somehow. And more importantly, what the elusive…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads john compton’s Collection house as a cemetery

In john compton’s book house as a cemetery we find a feast of sound, of image, of dream-states that blur in and out of place and time. As with all of compton’s poetry, we are immediately in the ether, there are no strings holding the puppets, there are no intermediaries between the void and the…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Gary Jackson’s New Collection small lives

Way back in the 2010s, being interviewed by Emilia Phillips over at 32 Poems about his Graywolf Press collection Missing You, Metropolis, Gary Jackson had this to offer on the topic of superhero comics: “… I wouldn’t say comics are the equivalent of my whole life (my ten-year-old self would feel betrayed); they just serve…
New Essay: “In Praise of Obscurity” by Thomas B

“I’m nobody! Who are you?” —Emily Dickinson I. Invocation: Lost Names “No, my name is lost.” So says Edgar in Act V of King Lear, a man dismantled by power and betrayal, speaking from the ruins of identity. Not a voluntary effacement but a forced disappearance. This is not the freedom of the nameless mystic;…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ruyan Meng’s Novel The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper is an intense book, maybe more so than any book I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Across 200 pages and 27 chapters, it tells the story of Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper trying to survive China’s Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. Essentially assigned to clean dead bodies…
“In Search of Lost Monsters”: Adam M. Rosen Reads Chelsea Sutton’s Novella Krackle’s Last Movie

Being a documentary filmmaker is a bit like trying to play God. They must embark on an agonizing process of creation, sifting endlessly through old interviews, letters, journals, and other raw archival bric-a-brac, cutting and reassembling the disparate bits and pieces until they merge into a single coherent narrative. The reward is that, under the…
Fiction Review: Kymberli Roberson Reads Dana Diehl’s New Collection The Earth Room

Dana Diehl takes us on a journey very few undertake in life in her short story collection, The Earth Room. It’s one of feminist self-discovery, of magical realism, the inherent organic bond between mankind and nature regardless of age, and the human psyche. This journey challenges not only the characters populating the stories themselves, but…
Fiction Review: Emily Hall Reads Kristina Ten’s Debut Collection Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine

Kristina Ten’s debut short-story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, is filled with female protagonists who refuse to acquiesce. Delightfully defiant, and reminiscent of Dahlia de la Cerda’s riotous Reservoir Bitches, Ten’s characters shrug off taboos and aren’t afraid of using violence to ensure their autonomy. Across the twelve stories in Tell Me…
Fiction Review: Sarah Bowen Holloway Reads Diane Josefowicz’s Linked Story Collection Guardians & Saints

Connected stories make up much of this wonderfully gnarly collection, Josefowicz’s third book of fiction, yet each of the offerings stands (and sings) alone, too. Many of these eleven tales include a doctor—usually a psychiatrist—and characters who suffer mental or physical illness. Protagonists or important characters are articulate, relatable children who are bewildered and brave…