Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…