Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Fiction Review: Elizabeth Shick Reads Jody Hobbs Hesler’s What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better
Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, explores the everyday hardships of American life with a tenderness and understanding that leaves open the possibility of hope. The characters that populate the 17 stories in this collection come from all walks of life: husbands and wives. Parents and…
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Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads K Hank Jost’s MadStone
There are a lot of different ways of being poor, and I have tried out several. I don’t want to oversell it. I’ve never lived on the street or anything. I’ve always had a safety net—parents who love me, and wouldn’t let me fall off the map without a fight—but there were definitely years when…
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Fiction Review: Mary Lynn Reed on Ashley Cowger’s On the Plus Side
Life is a delicate balancing act. For every decision that must be faced, there are pros and cons to be weighed. Is that boyfriend in L.A. worth giving up a paid internship for? How much does the tally tip when you factor in his flea-ridden dog? Is buying yourself expensive bracelets for your birthday worse…
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Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Mildred Kiconco Barya’s The Animals of My Earth School
The Animals of My Earth School, by Mildred Kiconco Barya, is a collection of poems about animals, surveying a few of the characteristics that they share with people and calling our attention to what we might see if we try looking at the world from the eye level of other kinds of creatures. Barya, originally…
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“Language as Collison and Fragment”: Edward Smallfield Reads Alexandra Mattraw’s Poetry Collection Raw Anyone
Raw Anyone is a title that asks us to ask what a title is. A title can locate (A Journal of the Plague Year) or gesture in a direction (The Wasteland). Raw Anyone feels like a fragment of language set free: uncooked, in a natural state, and in motion, searching, perhaps, to connect with an…
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Fiction Review: Jack Quinn Reads The Return by James Terry
Watching French film professor Bernard Aoust vainly grasping at the sands of time makes for captivating reading. Set in the author’s alma mater—UC Berkeley—we feel we are visiting an old haunt; such is Terry’s vivid description of the place. There we find fuddy-duddy Aoust in the timorous autumn years of his career, bewildered by the…
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Book Review: Shannon Nakai Reads Joy Harjo’s Selected Poems Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
In her foreword of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years, Iowa Writer’s Workshop classmate and fellow writer Sandra Cisneros underscores the racial and cultural identity of her longtime Indian friend, an identity that made Harjo vulnerable to dismissal and otherness in the…
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Poetry Review: Erica Bernheim Reads Mid/South Sonnets, an Anthology Edited by C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd
“Tell me about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! Rather than attempting to locate what the South is or “simply” to define the form, C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd’s anthology, Mid/South Sonnets, prioritizes description and…
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Fiction Review: Nick Stock & F. Tony Carusi Read Roy Goddard’s Morant
The teacher is a figure with whom we are all familiar. They are those who sacrifice, those who love, those who endure. In fact, we may say the teacher is precisely the vessel into which we pour our moral commitments for the world as we wish it to be, even as we increasingly fail to…
Heavy Feather Review 