Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
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…
“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…
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.…