Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“An Ontological Revolution”: On Jacques Darras’ John Scotus Eriugena at Laon and Other Poems by Peter Valente

In “To Augustine: On Paradise”—a central text in Jacque Darras’ John Scotus Eriugena at Laon and Other Poems—he writes, in the voice of a pagan in the 5th century A.D.: “As a youth, raised by my direct contact with Nature, I was a pagan. Although I never observed the formal rites or sacrifices of the…
Nonfiction Review: Ariana Duckett on Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman completed her PhD in comparative literature just before publishing her essay collection The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. While working towards the degree, she spent a summer abroad translating and analyzing Uzbek and Russian prose and poetry. She poses an insight on novel writing: “the novel form…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads George Perreault’s lie down as you were born

George Perreault’s lie down as you were born not only makes a song of grief, but peoples a town, grows a forest, seeds a sky, and weaves a myth in threads of sorrow. I was so immediately taken with these poems, pulled in and not allowed ransom. In these poems the voices of father, mill…
“it all simply modulates incomprehensibly”: On Richard Hell’s Poetry Collection What Just Happened by Peter Valente

When he was in his early twenties and living in lower Manhattan in 1974, Richard Hell founded the band Television with Tom Verlaine, a friend from high school. He eventually split up with Verlaine and created the Heartbreakers, along with Johnny Thunders, the well-known guitarist who had played with the New York Dolls. Later, he…
Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Mag Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals

As part of the arc of autobiographical American poetry, Mag Gabbert’s academic-press debut is a chiseled, yet tender self-portrait across lyric poems that skate around finalities and resonate through intersecting images, vignettes, and emotions. In this way, Gabbert’s heartfelt, jagged, and impressive poetry marks a departure from confessionalism’s origins in landed insight: Plath’s epiphanies, Lowell’s…
“Like a knight of stone who smiles”: On Robert Desnos’ Poetry Collection Night of Loveless Nights by Peter Valente

I first became aware of Robert Desnos’ poetry, as well as many of the works of the surrealists, in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster. The poem that was central to me in that volume was “No, Love Is Not Dead,” translated by Bill Zavatsky, with that memorable…