Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Art is never just”: Peter Valente on Touching the Art, a memoir by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

In Touching the Art, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore examines her complex relationship with her grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore, and the ways in which she impacted her own ideas about what it meant to be an artist; in doing so, she examines the legacy of racism in Baltimore, her own coming out as a queer…
“Style & Symptom”: K Hank Jost Reviews Jinnwoo’s Novella POLO

Between two burning fields, in a dying industrial village, a child’s sprint toward a coming-of-age is about to be chopped at the knees. The development of our unnamed, laconic narrator, alongside his soon-to-be ex-best friend, has fallen into the hands of a rotating gaggle of older boys. These wayward teenagers, engaging in self-harm, early drug…
Poetry Review: Kevin Gallagher Reads The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz

Sometimes you can swim with your eyes closed and learn something. You almost have to close your eyes and get ready to breathe into Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani. If you dive in with your eyes open they will sting and you can’t see a thing. The book is organized into six different movements,…
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…