Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“What Can Be Said Now”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, essays by Suzanne Roberts
At AWP, due to a last-minute cancellation, Suzanne Roberts was asked to fill in on a panel featuring writers who were accomplished at the writing their own lives in books, not one-off memoirs but multiple books. She said she and her husband rented out their house to collect California sized rent. They were temporarily living…
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A Review of Jon Roemer’s Novel Five Windows by Carl Fuerst
Most of Jon Roemer’s Five Windows happens in a San Francisco apartment that’s been stripped of its ceiling and walls. In this space that feels like a black box theatre, the book’s unnamed narrator interacts with a handful of characters, mostly from a distance. From these sparse elements, Roemer constructs a thoroughly fascinating and sometimes…
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Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, a new poetry collection by Maya C. Popa, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
“I can’t undo all I have done to myself, / what I have let an appetite for love do to me.” So opens the staggering latest collection of Maya C. Popa’s poetry, eloquently titled Wound is the Origin of Wonder. Such an opening couplet would suggest a poem of betrayal or unrequited love, but rather…
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Breakfast in Fur, a poetry collection by Jessica Murray, reviewed by Beth McDermott
In a world no longer quiet with belief, Breakfast in Fur, Jessica Murray’s debut collection of poetry, refuses to entertain naïve assumptions by imparting a sense that what peace there was, has been obliterated. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes, “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking…
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Book Review: Alex Carrigan on Afterword, a novel by Nina Schuyler
As we continue to debate the ethics regarding artificial intelligence in this day and age, one of the main questions regarding the abilities of AI is that if it can do something, should it? If it can create art or write term papers, should the AI be chastised for this when it was specifically programmed…
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The Kirschbaum Lectures, a new novel by Seth Rogoff, reviewed by Jacob M. Appel
Who is Sy Kirschbaum? Is he a “neurotic anarchist” rebelling against society’s total systems of control as his analyst at Vermont’s Mountain View Clinic claims? Or is he a literary-translator-turned-mystical-gumshoe on a tortuous pursuit of purloined manuscripts and exegetic enigmas across Mitteleuropa from Weimar Berlin to post-Velvet Prague? And on which side of that diaphanous…
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“Secret Rewards” Craft Essay: Jolene McIlwain on Writing PTSD in Fiction
You don’t want to think it’s your heart. You want to think it’s a pulled muscle, pinched nerve, or bad posture because you’ve always forgotten and slouched. But you agree to the stress test because if it is your heart, this is an early find. You’re only forty-seven. There’s time to repair. It’s been happening…
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Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Agustin Maes’ Newborn
“It’s about a dead baby.” This is what author Agustin Maes will reliably answer if you ask him about his book Newborn. Soft-spoken, and humble nearly to the point of bashfulness (this despite being a runner-up for the Paris Literary Prize his first time out the gate), he doesn’t always seem to grasp the weight…
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Foundations, a new novel by Abigail Stewart, reviewed by Hayli May Cox
In three dazzling parts, Abigail Stewart’s Foundations follows a trio of women across time, all of them connected by a single Dallas house. Bunny is a housewife who longs for genuine connection and friendship outside of the oppressive suburban life she’s found herself moored to. Jessica is an actress fleeing LA to find something else,…
Heavy Feather Review 