Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Caw Caw Phony, 21st-century nature poems by Michael Sikkema, reviewed by William Lessard
Saxophonist and composer Marion Brown mapped the pastoral for avant-garde jazz. “Afternoon of a Georgia Faun,” the title piece of his 1971 album, explores deciduous sonics beyond the jagged urbanism of Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and his own late 60s work. In an interview for 1973’s “Notesto Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: Views and…
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NSFW, a new novel by David Scott Hay, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald
Dystopian fiction is so hot right now. Hot like teen vampires before it. And child wizards before that. Hot like Chris Pine, and Michael B. Jordan, and J-Law. Hot like a Ron DeSantis book-burning. In Florida. In July. Hot like our annually warming planet. Speaking as someone who read The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New…
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Book Review: “The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s Collection of Tiny Heartbreaks and Keen Hopes” by Rosalia Scalia
Jen Michalski’s newest book, The Company of Strangers, gives us 194 pages of tiny heartbreaks and keen hopes. In a collection of 15 short stories, we see a slice of America through an array of characters who strive to manage and navigate complex lives, and at times, unexpected, heartbreaking events that befall them with the…
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“The Harmonic Structure of a Life”: Ryan Nowlin Reviews The Unwanted Sounds, a poetry collection by Lorraine Lupo
Writing letters to Lorraine Lupo over a period of three years was an extension of our friendship. Also, we engaged in dialogic literary criticism. Every time I sat down to write in response to a letter from Lorraine, not only did I reflect on what was happening in our current lives but also what I…
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Zachary Kocanda Reviews Kevin Maloney’s Novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim
How far would you go to live the life you imagined for yourself when you were young and anything was possible? To avoid working for your dad’s friend’s company for the rest of your life and hating yourself? Kevin Maloney’s new novel, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, chronicles the misadventures of the titular man-child—also named Kevin Maloney—on…
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“And Then What”: A Review of Julia Guez’s The Certain Body by Eric David Helms
“The dark is very dark,” Guez writes in “Still Life When All Our Symptoms Seem to Have Symptoms of Their Own,” a poem folded within The Certain Body, a collection which, over a span of three sections, examines the brave new world of grief and isolation during quarantine. With a tongue that combines “moon blood…
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Review: Patrick Parks on Man in a Cage, a novel by Patrick Nevins
In novels about Africa, the continent often serves as a moral landscape where imperialistic intruders degrade, defile, and attempt to destroy the cultures of people who have lived there for thousands of years. The fervent missionaries, unscrupulous capitalists, ambitious anthropologists of those books may not share a single reason for their interventions, but all do…
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Don’t Look at Me, a new novel by Charles Holdefer, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington
Charles Holdefer has lived in Europe for over forty years, mostly in France and Belgium, yet his fiction most often returns him to his native Midwestern U.S. In his latest novel, Don’t Look at Me, the main character is a six-foot nine-inch ex-basketball star and Masters’ student in Literature named Holly Winegarten. Holdefer, who is mainly…
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Review: Eric Williams on Can Xue’s Experimental Novella Mystery Train
There is a letter that Dante wrote to his patron, the powerful warlord of Verona Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet explains that, with regard to his work, “… non est simplex sensus, immo dici potest polysemos, hoc est plurium sensum,” meaning, roughly, that his Comedy “… hasn’t a simple meaning, rather it can…
Heavy Feather Review 