Category: Reviews & Criticism

Review: Alexandra Grabbe on Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern

Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting coming of age story that sends us on a magical journey of discovery across the United States and Canada. This debut novel will grab you from the get-go. We meet Leah Fern, the “World’s Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller.” Leah lives in a…
Dangerous Blues, kind of a ghost story by Stephen Policoff, reviewed by Laurie Loewenstein

In the months after my mother died, my father confided to me that he regularly talked to her. To her, not with her. Knocking around an empty house, he took comfort in telling her the events of his day—which cashier at Kroger had a new hair style, how many laps he’d done on the Y’s…
We Are Mermaids, poems by Stephanie Burt, reviewed by Robin Arble

There’s a moment in Stephanie Burt’s newest collection I’ve read so many times I memorized it by accident. In “Love Poem with Summer Camp Reunion,” the huge and frightening freedom of camp has given the poet enough distance from her life—from helpful but clueless parents, from treacherous hallways and classrooms, cafeterias and blacktops—to encounter her…
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…
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…
“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.…
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…