Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Jess Bowers Reads As If She Had a Say by Jennifer Fliss

From miscarriage to monstrous pregnancy, the women in Jennifer Fliss’ second collection, As If She Had a Say, often find their bodies in odd situations beyond their control. One woman finds herself dissolving into a puddle of water, then discovers it’s happening to every woman in the neighborhood. Another, a woodworker by trade, keeps getting…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Elle Nash’s Deliver Me

We teach people how to treat us. I don’t remember exactly where I first heard this little nugget of pop psychological wisdom, but it’s remained one of my most contemplated, and shared pieces of advice ever since. It sounds so simple, but for many people, myself included, it’s a truism that bears regular reminding. Though…
Poetry Review: Dave Karp Reads Hydra Medusa or Give the One You Want Away by Brandon Shimoda

Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa or Give the One You Want Away is a tantalizing book, one that unfolds through myriad echoes, motifs, and repetitions. Begun as a three-years-long daybook in response to the poet family’s peripatetic life and work and as a continuation of Shimoda’s 2018 The Desert: The Song Cave, this also conjures up…
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…