Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
“Some Membrane to Push Against”: Time, Memory, and Representation in Hayden Church’s So What? by Dustin Cole

Hayden Church’s new poetry collection So What? opens with a more or less perfect short story. “Jackson County War” is narrated by a perceptive three-year-old who describes the razing of his family farm and the slaughtering of its black and white inhabitants by the Great Possums, a powerful Jackson County clan disgruntled by the outcome…
“What We Leave Behind”: William O’Daly’s Poetry Collection The New Gods Reviewed by Toti O’Brien

With no title poem to ease our way, we wonder who William O’Daly’s New Gods are. Trying to identify them is one of several paths we can borrow as we tread the intricate landscape of his verse. Are they uppercase, lowercase? Singular or multiple? Are they better than the old ones? Are the old ones…
Book Review: The Anchored World, flash fairy tales and folklore by Jasmine Sawers, reviewed by Stephanie Martin

The Anchored World, Jasmine Sawers’ debut collection, uses flash fiction to reimagine classic Eastern and Western fairy tales and folklore that are often much longer than what Sawers’ has written. However, Sawers not only reimagines fairy tales and folklore; they also invent their own along the way. On the surface, Sawers’ collection seems to answer…
“A Duality, a Duet”: Reading Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures by Maxx Fidalgo

Described as a “genderbent, queer, biracial modern-retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein,” Addie Tsai delivers on all descriptors. Unwieldy Creatures follows Plum and Dr. Frank, two queer, nonbinary scientists who embark on their journey to play gods and create a human embryo without egg or sperm. In frame stories nestled into each other like Russian…
The Distortions, stories by Christopher Linforth, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe

In The Distortions, Christopher Linforth transports us to Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina in the aftermath of war. A bit of history to bring the book into focus: when Yugoslavia broke up into six independent countries in the nineties, Serbian nationalism led to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The twelve stories in this collection provoke…
“The Surreal Rendering of Trauma in Black Wool Cape by Alison Carb Sussman”: A Review by Jessica Purdy

Readers of Black Wool Cape will not be able to look away from Alison Carb Sussman’s surreal, deeply sensitive vision of the world and the part she plays in its histories. If the title Black Wool Cape conjures mysterious images of women on the verge of madness, let it also remind us of the horrors…