Category: Reviews & Criticism

“An Angry Bull Loose in a Video Store”: Jesse Hilson Reviews Steve Gergley’s Novel Skyscraper

Anyone who has shown up for a new job at a large, intricate organization and tried to get their bearings in the workplace will be able to relate to the germ of the idea behind Steve Gergley’s new novel Skyscraper. A 23-year-old man named Dan Simmons’s would like to play video games and watch action…
“self-evident and completely incomprehensible”: Austin Miles on Evan Isoline’s Insensible Text DƐVDMVTH

Insensibility invokes an opening. What’s insensible is ungriddable, unseizable, or unknown, even in plain sight. The inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, writing on insensible nature, says that it is “that which appropriates sense without being sensible to appropriation.” She draws on Georges Bataille’s notion of insensibility: “a form of animality which opens up a depth that…
Beasts of 42nd Street, a new novel by Preston Fassel, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I didn’t pick up my first Stephen King—The Shining—until 2016, but boy did he buy up a ton of early real estate in my young mind. An eight-year-old screening of the edited-for-TV Kubrick film was basically my intro to horror as a concept, and my favorite aunt and uncle were King superfans. I still remember…
“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…
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…
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.…
“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…
“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…
“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…