Category: Reviews & Criticism

Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Anders Carlson-Wee’s Second Poetry Collection Disease of Kings

Within the realm of narrative poetry, Anders Carlson-Wee’s second full-length book features two purposefully unemployed, dumpster-diving male best friends, who live at the fringes of American consumer culture in a nondescript apartment, and embody a sort of DIY punk rock esthetic of not working and living off the abundance tossed into dumpsters. Told through characters…
Fiction Review: Shyanne Hamrick Reads There Is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller

Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller’s There Is Only One Ghost in the World may have found life in the middle of a pandemic, but their collaborative book doesn’t steep in the tedium of socially distanced landscapes. These two writers instead tie a balloon to the narrative and gaze at contemporary America from a bird’s-eye view…
Book Review: Nadia de Vries on Jeffrey Grunthaner & Kenji Siratori’s Paracelsus’ Trouble with Sundays

If you were to put the Internet on paper, what would it look like? Perhaps this is a redundant question in 2023. The Internet has not been a separate mode of being since at least the early 2000s: it has long permeated everything we think and do. Media theorists like Nathan Jurgenson, Matthew Fuller, and…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joel Death, a novel by B.R. Yeager with illustrations by John Trefry

I love Billy Joel. I will not apologize, for I do not feel shame. When it comes to Billy Joel, I am shameless. I love his attic songs and his streetlife serenades; I love his cold spring harbors and his Summer highland falls. I love him from Oyster Bay Long Island to Soviet Leningrad to…
Poetry Review: Stephen Meisel Reads Dorothea Lasky’s Collection The Shining

It’s no secret that fire sign Dorothea Lasky believes in ghosts. Besides the essay “Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” in which she quite literally says so, one might notice the phantoms that haunt her poems’ yellow hallways. They might need rain boots to avoid the floods of milk and blood coming from God knows…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Chloe Chun Seim’s Illustrated Novel-in-Stories Churn

Churn, the debut novel by Chloe Chun Seim, is a work of considerate prose, intense emotional undercurrents, and painterly sensibilities. Seim’s writing often keeps its attention to aesthetics at the forefront while still packing an impressive punch, making it feel at times like an impressionist painting on the business end of a sledgehammer, and at…
“Deeper into the Fog”: Jonathon Atkinson Reads Bennett Sims’ Fiction Collection Other Minds and Other Stories

Bennett Sims’ fiction is populated by zombies, werewolves, and ghosts, but the essential horror lurking in his work is that trust—of oneself, of others, of the world—may be impossible. Almost to a person, his characters find themselves unable to fathom others. They are racked, as the title of his most recent book suggests, by the…
“A Love without Subject or Object”: Peter Valente on Claire DeVoogd’s Poetry Collection Via

For Jack Spicer, something remains when everything has been destroyed, and all attempts to find the Holy Grail have failed: God-language. The darkness from which is born the light. An anti-Grail, perhaps. There is no relief, no stability, no great achievement at the end of the road to imbue your life with meaning. You felt…
Fiction Review: Ben Tripp Reads Tom Comitta’s Novel The Nature Book

Some will be familiar with the style of experimental writing found between these covers. “This novel contains no words of my own,” the author ominously portends in the book’s short, explanatory preface. “I have gathered nature descriptions from over three hundred novels and arranged them into a single book.” The aesthetic of collage, or, more…