Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…
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.…
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…