Category: Reviews & Criticism

Shannon Nakai on Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods

The woods have often served as the storyteller’s theater of magical encounters and warnings. Breadcrumbs, lost trekkers, magic brooks, foreboding creatures—the trappings of the somewhat mystical aura that an uninterrupted primal space lends now hedges a 21st-century rural academic community. Juxtaposing folkloric history against a contemporary college town, Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2022

I’m a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create a list of suggestions from authors who share my penchant for more experimental or innovative…
Review: “An Emphasis on Origins in Figment by Leila Chatti” by Morgan English

Leila Chatti’s new work Figment is a book-length poem which loosely takes the form of an abecedarian. The alphabet acts as a guide through the associative, musical leaps Chatti makes from page to page. We first see the alphabet pushing the book along with: “amorphous / blank // belief be / lie con / ceive…
“There is now only light in my eyes”: On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Peter Valente

Antonio Gamoneda was only five years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He came of age during the Franco regime, a time when fear, ideological repression, incarcerations, and executions were commonplace. It is no surprise that someone who experienced such a world would not take the representations of reality for granted. In…
Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, a debut collection by BD Feil, reviewed by Jen Schneider

Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, written by BD Feil and published by Finishing Line Press, is a powerful force—one that leaves us curious about, if not optimistic for, experiences that lie ahead, and contemplative about the past. The collection propels while remaining bluntly and squarely grounded in periods of time and places no more.…
Pharoni, a novel by Colin Dodds, reviewed by Aaron Lee Moore

Thanks to the residual and resounding success of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, part of me now wonders if we’re now in for a resurrected trope of resurrected characters in literature. This is a sticky and risky wicket. Though with the notable exception of the biblical Christ, in most works of literature the loss…
Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag, a novel by Adam Johnson

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I used to have a very bad habit that routinely got me into trouble. And I call it a habit, but really it was probably something closer to a crosswired tic—a kind of subconscious psychic defense mechanism—I couldn’t help it, I swear—but regardless, my insistence on its innocuous,…
Review & Interview: Kristina T. Saccone on Sue Mell’s Giving Care

“I need more pills.” My mom’s texts arrive throughout my day—during back-to-back work meetings, while I’m driving to pick up my seven-year old son from school, and at all hours. “I need more pills.” “Can you get me more meds. I’ve run out.” But she isn’t out of pills; my mom has dementia. The texts…
“The Lilac Trash Enjamber”: A Review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer by PJ Lombardo

South Bend, Indiana, is a magnet for floral-horror. Summer there is so bright and blue it feels like a threat: poison grass, lively weeds, green fingers stabbing up the cracks on the westside pavement. Men wander in public and shout and wave their arms. Foxes dart. Gusts of real life. In the post-industrial midwest, terroristic…