Category: Reviews & Criticism

Dream of Me as Water, a poetry collection by David Ly, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko

There is a disorienting quality to Dream of Me as Water, David Ly’s sophomore poetry collection. The ethereality of water and blueness permeate Ly’s poems, which resist cohesive thematic groupings, although each section does have a sense of adding to what came before, as evident by their titles: “Dream,” “Dream of Me,” and “Dream of…
“Gonzo Dante”: Jesse Hilson on Garth Miró’s Novel The Vacation

Garth Miró’s novel The Vacation is rollicking, obscene fun with large veins of noxious social satire laced throughout. When a heroin-addicted, dissatisfied social climber joins a cruise in the Caribbean with his high-society European wife for a momentous time that could end in their divorce, or worse, they find themselves entering the corridors of an inescapable new…
Nympholepsy, a collaborative writing by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein & Lisa Marie Basile, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I hope the following statement will come across in the spirit in which it’s intended (i.e. not too pervy) but I have always had a soft spot for stories about female adolescence. Not necessarily the fun ones—though I did once read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in a single, delightful sitting—so much as the emotionally…
Erotic: New & Selected, a poetry collection by Alexis Rhone Fancher, reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Dangerous. Transgressive. In Erotic: New & Selected, Alexis Rhone Fancher brings together two previous collections, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen (2014) and Enter Here (2017), with new photos and poems all focused on sex. It’s not just a story of one couple, one betrayal, one ménage-a-trois. Erotic: New & Selected is a…
“Go for the Jugular”: James Braun Reviews Campfires of the Dead and the Living by Peter Christopher

Campfires of the Dead: If you know you know. Know the cult-like status this long-out-of-print book has achieved, with original copies running over a hundred bucks on Amazon—or otherwise elsewhere—as of this writing. Know too, maybe, these stories as written under the wing and teachings of Gordon Lish, with an all-in focus on the acoustics…
“Cowboy Koans”: Jesi Buell Reviews Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

When you see a pronghorn antelope from your car, high upnorth in Nevada, by the Walker River Rez, I don’t knowwhat to be, the antelope, the person seeing the antelope,the grass that the antelope is eating, the feeling the person getsfrom seeing the antelope, the feeling the antelope has whileeating the grass, so I try…
Thank You for Being, a poet’s memoir of home by Merle Bachman, reviewed by Marjorie Pryse

In her new book, Thank You for Being, Merle Bachman produces a hybrid work, a prose-poem of sorts. Although the book sketches various locations its poet-narrator has lived or traveled, her real home takes place in words. “Never wanted to be tied down” becomes the mantra of this reflection of a life: no house but…
Maze Poems, a hybrid collection by David Harrison Horton, reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

Whether as poetry, personal revelation, or simply the transcription of the dynamic play of the uninhibited mind in flux, writing that evades deliberate, conscious direction has the potential to convert language from a practical vehicle of plain communication to an otherly-textured medium in which words are brought together and narratives are shaped on the basis…
“ATLiens and ‘american’ Identity”: Jacob Collins-Wilson Reviews Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s MissSettl

MissSettl, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s debut book of poetry, unfurls language—it’s a book that seeks to play with sound, words, meaning and form all while trying to fight, to throw haymakers and knock “yt” America into a manifestation resembling respect and ethics, or at least acceptance. It is also a book of love poems, directly and…