Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Book Review: Adam Camiolo on Boundless as the Sky by Dawn Raffel
“You need humans to do what humans can’t do.” Dawn Raffel’s newest work of compact prose and deep imagination, titled Boundless as the Sky, is a sincerely humane response to one of postmodernism’s most abstract masterpieces. It’s a powerful story. The book is a web of vignettes directly patterned after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and…
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Call Me Spes, poems by Sara Cahill Marron, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington
Some poets settle into a voice and use it over and over again. But in her new book, Call Me Spes, Sara Cahill Marron admirably experiments with another kind of poetry altogether different from her previous, more lyrical book, Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here. Born in Virginia but currently living in New York, her work…
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“The Creative Use of Reality”: Peter Valente on Mark Alice Durant’s Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera
While reading Mark Alice Durant’s loving portrait of Maya Deren, I was reminded of all the days and nights I spent as a teenager at Anthology Film Archives where I saw all of Maya Deren’s films. She was important to me when I started making short experimental films with a small point and-shoot Canon camera.…
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The Wake and the Manuscript, a novel by Ansgar Allen, reviewed by Adnan Bayyat
The Wake and the Manuscript is a literary artifact pronouncing and protesting the inherent toxicity of education from cradle to grave. The brooding thesis, expounded through the prism of quasi-fiction, holds that “to become educated is to become sick.” Education purportedly “takes the fabric of life and tears it up and shits it out.” This…
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How to Start a Coven, a surrealist fiction chapbook by Deirdre Danklin, reviewed by Stephanie Bohland
Deirdre Danklin’s How to Start a Coven is a collection of haunting flash fiction that takes us through a fever dream of skeletons, banshees, and an ancient earth that hasn’t forgotten magic. This surrealist chapbook is comprised of previously published pieces, all powerful on their own, but it is in bringing together this assortment of…
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Shannon Hozinec Reviews Meghan Lamb’s New Novel COWARD
Meghan Lamb’s COWARD opens with a burning sky that smells of blood. This is no harbinger of the apocalypse, however, as one might assume—we are promised that this burning is “natural, […] a part of life”; that it happens every year, and that there is an “other side”—an end—within reach. We need only sit and wait until…
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Review: Jody Hobbs Hesler on Lisa Cupolo’s story collection Have Mercy on Us
The ten keenly observed stories in Lisa Cupolo’s award-winning debut collection Have Mercy On Us usher us into a world of strained relationships. Whether in Kenya, Canada, Florida, or California, every character struggles to exert more power than their relationships allow, to matter more than they do—to themselves or to other significant players in their lives. In…
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On Joke Architecture in Elise Houcek’s Tractatus: “FINAL PROOF OF THE ETERNAL SUBJECTIVITY OF LANGUAGE!” by Maxwell Rabb
Words are playthings, and by no means is this trivial. There is an unadulterated joy to constructing language—to cutting up and arranging the pieces. There is suspense, an unalloyed momentum, to the words that endure tangibly in poetry. Unfortunately, language is frequently inundated by a deluge of abstractions, forcing the simple pleasure of words to…
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“All Was Lost”: Robert Crooke Reviews Men in My Situation, a novel by Per Petterson
A real-life tragedy haunts this beautiful, touchingly honest novel by celebrated Norwegian author Per Petterson. The event in question is a fire that in 1990 destroyed the Scandinavian Star ferryboat during an overnight voyage between Norway and Denmark. This profound catastrophe, which claimed the lives of 159 passengers—including Petterson’s parents, a brother, and a nephew—has…
Heavy Feather Review 