Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Hybrid Review: Connor Fisher Reads Dennis James Sweeney’s You’re the Woods Too

You’re the Woods Too is Dennis James Sweeney’s first full-length collection, published in 2023 by Essay Press. This hybrid collection of poems, diary entries, and prose presents Sweeney’s concerns with the experience and creation of art in solitary, natural spaces. Furthering its hybridity, the collection is loosely framed as a stage play that the authorial…
“All About Eve”: Jesi Bender Reads Carolyn Oliver’s Poetry Chapbook Mirror Factory

“I’ll writhe wild-eyedfor your city full of spies drink their desire and spitit out in a flood.” Carolyn Oliver’s Mirror Factory is a chapbook of persona poems that focus on archetypal female figures, including: Catherine of Aragon, Emily Dickinson, Iphigenia, and the ultimate Abrahamic feminine symbol, the OG if you will, Eve. The title comes…
“Cheers to the Weirdos! Part Deux”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2023

It’s almost 2024, another year, and I’m still a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create an occasional list of suggestions from authors who…