Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
The PornME Trinity, the 2nd Edition of David Leo Rice’s novella, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

Though I haven’t ever been able to source the original quote, Chuck Klosterman once shared a borrowed sentiment which has endured, for me, at least as strongly as anything else he’s ever written (and I’m a pretty big fan). The quote of the quote, from I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains, reads as…
Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour, memories of Soviet Russia by Yelena & Galina Lembersky, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe

After reading Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour by Yelena & Galina Lembersky, I felt as if I had run the gantlet and stumbled out the other side with bruises all over my body. Why? The authors document the harsh reality of life in the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold…
Simultaneities & Lyric Chemisms, Futurist poetry by Ardengo Soffici, reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

Ardengo Soffici—poet, painter, art critic—only spent a short time as a Futurist, but it was a particularly fruitful time. His initiation into Futurism was unconventional. As critic for the influential Florentine journal La Voce, in spring of 1911 he saw a number of Futurist paintings in an exhibition at La Mostra d’Arte Libera in Milan.…
“Remember This When You’re Hungry”: Morgan English Reviews Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish

Remember this: “Even a ghost that eats and dies again will have better color.” Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish presents myth, story, and language as inseparable from the rituals of eating and preparing food. The speaker lives inside a legend: “I must / cherish this landscape because all the persimmons tumbling down / the…
Dave Fitzgerald Reviews Terena Elizabeth Bell’s Story Collection Tell Me What You See

It’s funny. When I scheduled with Heavy Feather last month for this to be my first review of 2023, I didn’t really give much thought to the fact that it would post just a few days after the 2nd anniversary of the January 6th attacks. I mean, sure, I thought it would be a good…
Ansgar Allen: Review of Performances for the End of Time by Harold Jaffe

Harold Jaffe’s latest, Performances for the End of Time, has all but given up on humanity. In the assessment of the book, humanity is facing its end, and knows it. This knowledge cannot be digested. There is no digesting the fact of one’s imminent and unavoidable self-destruction. Humanity persists within the book as a serviceable…