Category: Reviews & Criticism

“A Novel for a New America”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Daniel Lefferts’ Novel Ways and Means

In 2016, Alistair McCabe’s dreams of a fantasy banking job have fizzled. His paramours, an older gay couple named Mark and Elijah, are facing a breakup due to financial and emotional fizzles. America—rife with Donald Trump’s fiery, and at many times nonsensical, rantings—teeters toward a breaking point. Meanwhile, Alistair finds himself running for his life…
Fiction Review: Dave Karp Reads Stacey Levine’s Novel Mice 1961

Stacey Levine has always been the bard of the marginal, the writer with the genius to destabilize a story with askew language and events. Her novels are also wince-inducingly funny, and Mice 1961, her first since Frances Johnson, is no exception. The new novel is set in an odd, artificial 1960s Florida, a confection made…
Poetry Review: Elizabeth Zuba Reads Noelle Kocot’s Collection Ascent of the Mothers

A slim volume of 64 pages, Noelle Kocot’s newest collection Ascent of the Mothers volatizes the human body and blows it off into the winds of nowhere and always. If you’re familiar with Kocot’s work you already know they are a master of sifting out the right loose cluster of words to briefly summon, and…
Nonfiction Review: Lily Blackburn Reads A. V. Marraccini’s Essay We the Parasites

In We the Parasites, a five-part essay/memoir, A. V. Marraccini celebrates and critiques the acute, embodied experience of dedicating one’s life to admiring and critiquing art; the way we move through, haunt, and are haunted by the art that won’t leave us. But rather than locate this experience as solely intellectual, in the delivery of…
Fiction Review: Oli Peters Reads Lauren Cook’s Field Guide Sex Goblin

Oftentimes, Sex Goblin feels like a lustrous alternative to the doomscroll. Non-narrative vignettes—which all utilize an “I” that assumes different lives and situations in each “story”—are transitioned between with short lines that read both like brilliant tweets (“We don’t have to ride or die we can just chill”) and like aphorisms (“The human brain didn’t…
Fiction Review: Andrew Farkas Reads Michael Czyzniejewksi’s Collection The Amnesiac in the Maze

According to T.S. Eliot, we supposedly read “many books because we can’t know enough people.” Having experienced (and enjoyed) Michael Czyzniejewski’s stories over the years, I’ve always believed Czyzniejewski agrees with Eliot. After reading his most recent collection, The Amnesiac in the Maze, I no longer need to believe; I know. I think Czyzniejewski would…
Poetry Review: Carole Mertz Reads Ida Börjel’s Collection Ma

Swedish Ida Börjel, like the Scandinavian author Inger Christensen, models her collection on abecedary for her striking 2014 volume. Ma, in its 2023 first English edition, however, resembles the Danish author’s compendium only in its structural format. Unlike Christensen, Börjel’s work is a dark, suffering, and probing account that frequently draws on war, deprivation, and…
Poetry Review: Valentina Linardi Reads Erin Hoover’s Collection No Spare People

No Spare People by Erin Hoover is a tale of female resilience, through different circumstances, places, almost through different lives, narrated in clear, easy to understand words. People and scenes are described in a sprinkling of straightforward expressions that make us feel like a spectator, almost an actor in the ongoing play, strikingly so in…
“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:…