Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…