Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“Art Is Life and Life Is Art”: Peter Valente on Tell Me I’m an Artist, a new novel by Chelsea Martin
Chelsea Martin’s novel, Tell Me I’m an Artist, is a coming-of-age story about a young artist, Joelle Berry (Joey), living in San Francisco and studying at an unnamed Art School, as she confronts her own complex feels about what it means to create meaningful art while balancing the problems that she left behind in her…
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Brontosaurus Illustrated, a graphic novel by Leanne Grabel, reviewed by Cathy Smith
A violent kidnapping and rape at the age of nineteen created a Brontosaurus-sized trauma in Leanne Grabel’s life. In the accordingly-titled Brontosaurus Illustrated, she tells her tale in vivid words and drawings to explain how this trauma has lived with her for more than fifty years. Though slightly fictionalized, every single word of this book…
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Book Review: Francois Bereaud on Faith, a novel by Itoro Bassey
Nigeria is a vast country with a rich literary heritage. Award winning authors including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have influenced writers and readers across the globe. Now, with her debut novel Faith, the Nigerian-American writer Itoro Bassey announces herself as one of the next voices in this powerful tradition.…
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“Frenzy of material, frenzy of discharge!”: A Review of Zoe Darsee’s Poetry Chapbook Bell Logic by Maxwell Rabb
Music is ornamented by the caesura; by the muted punctures that impel the audience to imagine deprivation. The song’s melody is impeded, and for a moment, there is disorder. Immediately stopping a song’s melodic momentum, the listener is propelled into silence, but the song moves forward, unabated by the composer’s predestined pauses. In sequence, the…
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“Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall”: Michael Quinn Reviews Come Thunder by Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Like flashes of lightning, the 62 poems in Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Come Thunder illuminate pivotal moments in a long life that reveal meaning in the seemingly mundane. Told in the first person by a woman named Barbara, they use plain language and striking images to explore the speaker’s evolution: how the little girl becomes a…
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“If I Had to Read It Again for the First Time, I Would”: Jacob Collins-Wilson Reviews Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed
Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida and including the full original Swedish version) is a short book of short poems that highlights imagery, nature, memories, and the strength of word-choice to create a cross-stitch of life during and after destruction. It is a book about growing up in war and…
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Review: Alexandra Grabbe on Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern
Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting coming of age story that sends us on a magical journey of discovery across the United States and Canada. This debut novel will grab you from the get-go. We meet Leah Fern, the “World’s Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller.” Leah lives in a…
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Dangerous Blues, kind of a ghost story by Stephen Policoff, reviewed by Laurie Loewenstein
In the months after my mother died, my father confided to me that he regularly talked to her. To her, not with her. Knocking around an empty house, he took comfort in telling her the events of his day—which cashier at Kroger had a new hair style, how many laps he’d done on the Y’s…
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We Are Mermaids, poems by Stephanie Burt, reviewed by Robin Arble
There’s a moment in Stephanie Burt’s newest collection I’ve read so many times I memorized it by accident. In “Love Poem with Summer Camp Reunion,” the huge and frightening freedom of camp has given the poet enough distance from her life—from helpful but clueless parents, from treacherous hallways and classrooms, cafeterias and blacktops—to encounter her…
Heavy Feather Review 