Category: Reviews & Criticism
-
“Endless Hallways”: Laura Paul Reviews George Wylesol’s 2120
*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Called a printed “point and click escape game,” George Wylesol’s new comic, 2120, shows how the influence of interactivity continues to exert itself in narratives, even on the page. Taking its form as an analog video game in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure, the book…
-
“The Alienation of the Long Distance Stalker”: Laura Paul Reviews Ali Raz’s Alien
Ali Raz’s newest book, Alien, is a novella about a hunter on the lookout for extraterrestrials in a city facing consistent destruction. For a quick read, it is not without its sharp risks and thrilling angles. In our time of heightened brutality, when friction is omnipresent, Alien hits the unlikely sweet spot of engaging enough…
-
With Different Eyes, an illustrated prose collaboration by Paul Smart & Richard Kroehling
With Different Eyes is a heart-stabbing book collaboration by the writer Paul Smart and the artist Richard Kroehling. The subtitle calls it “A Covid Waltz in Words & Images,” which doesn’t tell you much about this remarkable little volume. The pages are slightly wider than they are tall, and the narrative unfolds in very brief…
-
The Last Dinosaurs of Portland, a prose chapbook by James R. Gapinski, reviewed by Shyanne Hamrick
The Last Dinosaurs of Portland may immerse us in Portland, Oregon, but do not be fooled: the collection of ten short stories doesn’t linger there, not really. Instead, it is a surreal version of Portland comprised entirely of bridges—those “rusted footbridges that spiral out of your bedroom window and meander toward your ex’s neighborhood” and…
-
Disembodied, a book-length fragmented fiction by Christina Tudor-Sideri, reviewed by S. D. Stewart
In his fragmentary work The Step Not Beyond (State University of New York Press, 1992; translated by Lycette Nelson), Maurice Blanchot describes writing as “not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.” This concept of…
-
Dave Fitzgerald on Interrogating the Abyss, collected works by Chris Kelso
What is the abyss? Several years back, I went hiking in the Catskills with my now-wife, my childhood best friend, and his then-girlfriend in search of some unmapped swimming hole cliffjumps we’d heard about. The first one we came to was quite high, and quite narrow—a slim, deep canyon enclosing a complexly tiered waterfall. There…
-
O, a poetry collection by Niki Tulk, reviewed by Tara Walker
When you read Niki Tulk’s O, you are enclosing yourself within a rich tapestry of glistening threads: motherhood, daughterhood, grief, falling, ruthless love and cruelty, the moon, the ocean, transformation and becoming and leaving and being born. A lesser writer might struggle to blend these elements. A book that contains phone calls with prosecutors, the…
-
Where Are the Snows, a poetry collection by Kathleen Rooney, reviewed by Esa Grigsby
As the cover suggests, these poems are a winding wry road towards the hell Rooney, almost delightfully, explains is Earth, where the speed bumps are humor, the billboards politics, and the golf-ball sized hail is spirituality. The landscape speeding, yet somehow also wallowing, by is peppered with memories, humor, philosophy, and good ole nihilism: “Sometimes…
-
The Not Yet Fallen World, new and selected poems by Stephen Dunn, reviewed by Jeanne Griggs
The Not Yet Fallen World: New and Selected Poems, by Stephen Dunn, offers poems from his nineteen volumes of poetry and adds nine new poems; there’s a last section of poems written right before his death on June 24, 2021. Dunn’s poems are famous for his observations of the marvelous in the ordinary, and for…
Heavy Feather Review 