Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“Must there be sacrifice?”: Claire Polders Reads Jennifer Lang’s Memoir-in-Miniature Places We Left Behind
Peripatetic As a nomad, I’m drawn to international stories about displacement. My life drastically changed when my husband and I lost our Parisian home in the winter of 2019 and began traveling around the world. I cannot always identify why my wandering existence is as challenging as it is rewarding, so I seek out authors…
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Nonfiction Review: Karin Falcone Krieger Reads Kristina Marie Darling’s Essay Collection Look to Your Left
Prolific author and champion of experiment Kristina Marie Darling reveals a thriving culture of feminist poetics in this recent collection of critical essays, as well as using the lyric essay to expose the dark side of sexism in academic circles. In a spare 140 pages, this collection has many characteristics of a conventional academic text.…
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Poetry Review: Nathan D. Metz Reads Marisa Lin’s Dream Elevator
Of all our wonderful and slightly un-universal definitions we have for poetry, perhaps the one most present and pressing to our twenty-first-century imaginations is that poetry, by its mere existence, is an attempt to reckon with movement—its nature, reasons, and consequences. In Marisa Lin’s first chapbook Dream Elevator,a title that invokes both physical and psychic…
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Poetry Chapbook Review: Jess Chua Reads Root Rot by Rhienna Renée Guedry
Root Rot, Rhienna Renée Guedry’s debut chapbook, piqued my curiosity for several reasons. For as long as I remember, I’ve loved nature and the environment. I also enjoy examining the darker side of life and the psyche, and how we cope when processing experiences like loss and grief. Furthermore, the poems were written on or…
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Poetry Review: Jeffrey Kahrs Reads Amelia Rosselli’s Epic The Dragonfly
By any measure The Dragonfly is an extraordinary work of a young poet stretching the language between meaning and the paradoxical, and in turn engaging in an often-Manichean battle to define the ethical and moral. Sailing into the wind of the era of existentialism, the tacking and lurching of Amelia Rosselli’s poems reflects her singular…
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Nonfiction Review: Eric Aldrich Reads Marcia Aldrich’s Essay Collection Edge
I’m reading Marcia Aldrich’s essay collection, Edge, when I get a text from a friend who is worried that he’s found bones belonging to a deer he knows. Edge is largely, though not exclusively, a book about deer, and I receive my friend’s message at the same moment I’m reading an essay in which Aldrich…
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“linguist body still writing thoughts”: Edward J. Matthews Reads Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3
To state that Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a compelling conceptual collaboration between Japanese glitch-cyberpunk author Kenji Siratori, the Canadian electro-acoustic duo Wormwood based in London, Ontario, and a coterie of academics, writers, artists, philosophers, and other members of The Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds, is…
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Poetry Review: evelyn bauer Reads The Sky Broke More by Garth Graeper
The Sky Broke More turns ecopoetics to horror, a reminder that nature is incredibly vast and mysterious, and we are soft, small, and vulnerable in the face of it. A prescient topic, as the climate catastrophe kicks around in the back of my head, readjusting my relationship to nature with every natural disaster, every strange…
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Fiction Review: Nicole Yurcaba Reads New Millennium Boyz by Alex Kazemi
In the United States, 1999 was a year riddled with huge headlines. Bill Clinton’s impeachment trials began. Yugoslav security forces killed Albanians in Racak, Kosovo. Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” released, becoming the artist’s third UK #1 hit; and music began its irrevocable relationship with the internet. On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,…
Heavy Feather Review 