Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“A frame for the raw moment”: Reflexes on Sarah Rosenthal’s Lizard by Alex Rieser
There is something powerful about newness, when you first hold the book in your hands, its glossy cover and particular weight. Release parties, the words of praise on the back, honest or not. Newness is a vulnerable state. The artist has sent it onto the world and the world has yet to decide if it…
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“a book is the song / of the body”: Michael Collins Reads Arthur Kayzakian’s Poetry Collection The Book of Redacted Paintings
Behind Arthur Kayzakian’s debut collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, lies an unwritten history involving the speaker’s father, who was disappeared in the Iranian Revolution. The collection, the inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series Selection, ostensibly centers around the speaker’s efforts to recover a stolen portrait of his father, the painting itself accruing gravity to…
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“Forever Young. And Terrorized.”: Brandon M. Stickney Reads Aaron Jacobs’ Novel Time Will Break the World
In 1976, a busload of children was hijacked by masked, gun-toting men. The Chowchilla, California (near Sacramento), bus kidnapping and live burial remains one of the most bizarre, and under-reported crimes in American history—from the $5 million ransom the wealthy perpetrators never got to demand, to the daring, bus driver-led midnight escape from the underground…
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Fiction Review: Jess Bowers Reads As If She Had a Say by Jennifer Fliss
From miscarriage to monstrous pregnancy, the women in Jennifer Fliss’ second collection, As If She Had a Say, often find their bodies in odd situations beyond their control. One woman finds herself dissolving into a puddle of water, then discovers it’s happening to every woman in the neighborhood. Another, a woodworker by trade, keeps getting…
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Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Elle Nash’s Deliver Me
We teach people how to treat us. I don’t remember exactly where I first heard this little nugget of pop psychological wisdom, but it’s remained one of my most contemplated, and shared pieces of advice ever since. It sounds so simple, but for many people, myself included, it’s a truism that bears regular reminding. Though…
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Poetry Review: Dave Karp Reads Hydra Medusa or Give the One You Want Away by Brandon Shimoda
Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa or Give the One You Want Away is a tantalizing book, one that unfolds through myriad echoes, motifs, and repetitions. Begun as a three-years-long daybook in response to the poet family’s peripatetic life and work and as a continuation of Shimoda’s 2018 The Desert: The Song Cave, this also conjures up…
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Fiction Review: Atsushi Ikeda Reads The Book Of: A Compendium by Frank Peak
Early on in Frank Peak’s The Book Of, a man named Hat breaks a dollar for two quarters with a newspaper vendor. He checks the dates on the coins, and if his “private smile” at the vendor means anything, maybe those coins are a Bicentennial and a 1965, like the two quarters he’s carried around,…
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“Shut Up and Work: Labor and Alienation in Babak Lakghomi’s South” by Corey Qureshi
Workplaces and life settings can often be characterized by static, particular moods. At times, these moods can be disrupted by outbursts that disturb all acclimated to norms. Some grow irritated, wanting to silence the foreign phenomena as quickly as possible. Disturbance can bring intense, unwanted change. B is the first-person lead of Babak Lakghomi’s new…
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“With Breath Line to Line”: Kara Dorris Reads in coming light by Ashley Howell Bunn
Too often poetry is synonymous with the mind rather than the body, but, as Emily Dickinson reminds us, poetry should make “[our] whole body so cold no fire can ever warm [us].” Instead of forgetting the world and our bodies beyond the page, Ashley Howell Bunn’s somatic writing encourages us to use our breath, our…
Heavy Feather Review 