Category: Reviews & Criticism

“the I who meets the eye / in the evaporating pool”: Michael Collins Reads Michael Joseph Walsh’s Poetry Collection Innocence

Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence, winner of the 2021 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition, reads like a book-length meditation that cycles between themes and perspectives, continually recreating the experience of consciousness seeing itself and the world anew. “Common Flowers” beautifully evokes our experience of self-perception through creating and taking in—being taken in by—creative work:…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Évelyne Grossman’s Short Essay The Creativity of the Crisis

We often think of crisis and creativity as related states, as seemingly polar opposites that can reverse polarity at any time, transforming one into the other. Crisis can give rise to creativity just as creativity can provoke a crisis in the creator. Think, for example, of Giorgio de Chirico’s illness and state of depression as…
Fiction Review: Amelia Kingman Reads Bronwyn Fischer’s Novel The Adult

Being eighteen is, well, weird. You are treated as a grown-up, but also like a child. The responsibilities are crushing and new, and the world opens up in exciting, scary ways. No one teaches you how to make friends or how to pay taxes. People fall in and out of your life, and the need…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Percival Everett’s New Novel James

I am a man who is cognizant of his world, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. James, the titular character of Percival Everett’s twenty-fourth novel, writes these…
Fiction Review: Brianna Kale Reads Jacqueline Vogtman’s Collection Girl Country

In Jacqueline Vogtman’s beautiful, poignant, and haunting short story collection Girl Country, we are invited to explore the female experience in the modern era through the lens of magical realism and a sprinkling of historical fiction. The stories carry strong feminist themes and universal truths that effortlessly blend with nervy craft. Vogtman strikes the perfect balance…
“Some Kind of Monster”: Stephen Meisel Reads Dave Fitzgerald’s Novel Troll

The trashed halls of pop culture are littered with Slenderman copypastas taken to horrific conclusions and jokes turned into career-threatening scandals. Yes, it’s true. These days, we have a lot of trouble figuring out just how seriously we should take anything—anything at all. Enter Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll, an encyclopedia of cringe, the novel no one…
“Art is never just”: Peter Valente on Touching the Art, a memoir by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

In Touching the Art, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore examines her complex relationship with her grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore, and the ways in which she impacted her own ideas about what it meant to be an artist; in doing so, she examines the legacy of racism in Baltimore, her own coming out as a queer…
“Style & Symptom”: K Hank Jost Reviews Jinnwoo’s Novella POLO

Between two burning fields, in a dying industrial village, a child’s sprint toward a coming-of-age is about to be chopped at the knees. The development of our unnamed, laconic narrator, alongside his soon-to-be ex-best friend, has fallen into the hands of a rotating gaggle of older boys. These wayward teenagers, engaging in self-harm, early drug…
Poetry Review: Kevin Gallagher Reads The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz

Sometimes you can swim with your eyes closed and learn something. You almost have to close your eyes and get ready to breathe into Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani. If you dive in with your eyes open they will sting and you can’t see a thing. The book is organized into six different movements,…