Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Fiction Review by Catherine Parnell: “When We Are Known, or A Brief Natural History of Women by Sarah Freligh”

Every universe has its ruler, a tool that inches toward an unquestionable, crowning truth. Such is the case with Sarah Freligh’s A Brief Natural History of Women, her collection of flash fiction, some flash clocking in at a quarter of a page, others slightly longer, but all equally satisfying in their landings. If veritas is…
“our more or less common ground”: Michael Collins Reads Sherod Santos’ The Burning World

Sherod Santos’ tenth collection, The Burning World, is an extended meditation on conflicts ranging from martial to internal, involving everything from globalism and technology to classical literature. Various metaphors and devices reincorporate and complicate throughout the sequence, allowing us to see into the psychological subtleties at their roots. “Having Already Invented the Greeks,” opens on…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Benjamin Drevlow’s Testament The Book of Rusty

Benjamin Drevlow’s The Book of Rusty is unlike any other. It’s 390 pages of raw Rusty, a young man’s “mem-wah” about his coming-of-age struggles. Rusty is the outsider looking in, dealing with the loss of his older brother to suicide. Subtitled Another Testament of Benjamin Drevlow, it’s one hell of an intense testimony. Rusty is…