Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of”: Peter Valente Reads Eileen Myles’ Anthology of Pathetic Literature
Pathetic Literature, an anthology edited by Eileen Myles, is a wide-ranging collection of writers and poets, both in the US and abroad. It offers us an intricate mosaic, where each story resonates with the other, developing themes and ideas in a subtle way. I can only hint at some of the major themes in this…
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Fiction Review: Joe Sacksteder Reads The Prodigious Earth by Eric Blix
Eric Blix’s incandescent novel, The Prodigious Earth, is divided into three sections, “The City,” “Old World,” and “Ruin,” an ABA format in which the third section picks up the first’s characters and plots, as well as its structure of very short numbered chapters, many of which are appropriated quotations from such figures as Teddy Roosevelt,…
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“The Physics of Pain”: A Reading of Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche by Andrew Felsher
Vi Khi Nao’s most recent memoir, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, arrived for me as a mathematical task. It was January of this year. I was in an airport in Finland on an eleven-hour layover en route to see Yehui, my partner, who had been in China for the past six months to…
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No Land’s Man, an impossible travel memoir by Lisa Carver, reviewed by Ric Royer
In the preface for her newest book, No Land’s Man, Lisa Carver says of herself: “I wander through life … getting lost and losing things and forgetting things and breaking things and tripping on nothing. It’s a miracle I’ve survived this far.” This turns out to be a useful disclaimer for the energetic, capricious, and…
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“Now That the Sky Is a Mall”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews Rewild, a poetry collection by Meredith Stricker
“Ecopoetics trades an Emersonian or Thoreauvian attention to sublime, untouched nature for sites of extraction, chemical spills, and other manifestations of ecosystemic violence.” –Jean Thomas Tremblay In 1990 Jack Collom published his long documentary ecopoem entitled “Passages” about the passenger pigeon, once so numerous “they blotted out the sun,” and their extinction at the hands…
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Book Review: Adam Camiolo on Rick White’s Story Collection Talking to Ghosts at Parties
“Arriving last of all he stands on the periphery of the melee, just slightly out of reach of the fun. The same way he’ll stand at so many parties when he gets older.” Good flash fiction is best thought of as a meal. The required ingredients are simple: a lure, speed, a surprise, and set…
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“The Selenomancer’s Moods”: S.G. Mallett on Reading by the Light of Maureen Alsop’s Poetry Collection Pyre
You probably won’t play the haruspex, as the interlocutor reveals the noumena via their mode of inquiry but is rendered too distanced to be biographical; you will play the attendant through aisles, the ciphers above the doors on your walk through Maureen Alsop’s imaginary garden with incantatory toads in them. Whereas Mirror Inside Coffin traces…
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“Cause and Cracks that Create the Infinite Possibilities”: John Greiner on Randee Silv’s New Prose Poetry Collection Nextness
The push and pull that holds tension taught, the lightness caught by the heavy hand that moves fluidly, the same and the different of what was and what will be, these are the things that cause the cracks that are created to overflow with infinite possibilities, possibilities that fill the work of Randee Silv and…
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Book Review: Matt Matros on Outer Sunset, a novel by Mark Ernest Pothier
Jim Finley, following in the tradition of retired high school English teachers everywhere, is always ready to offer his literary insight. Without much prompting, he’ll tell you that, according to Wallace Stevens, “a good poem resolves the tension between sentimentality and seeing things as they truly are.” If only Jim could do the same. The…
Heavy Feather Review 