Category: Reviews & Criticism

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,…
“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…
“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…
“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…
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,…
“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…
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…
“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…
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…