Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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“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…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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“Peanut-Butter the Apartment”: Jonah Meyer Reviews Sarah Katz’s Poetry Collection Country of Glass
In her debut poetry collection Country of Glass, Sarah Katz has woven a humane and haunting book of poems. Imbued with a compassionate sensitivity that seeks to acknowledge and grapple with the harsh realities which too often afflict humanity, such as strife within both self and family, illness and assault, and larger societal and global…
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Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, a story collection by Maya Sonenberg, reviewed by Sally Whitehill
In her new short story collection, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, Maya Sonenberg weaves anthropological texts and court documents (and a Barbie textbook) with the magical realism of fairy tales in a poetic and measured prose that twists and deepens our sense of the conscious world through the lens of what it means to be a…
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“No Dimensions”: Matthew Kinlin on Evan Isoline’s PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY
In For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet argues, “Each novel must invent its own form.” In PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY, Evan Isoline constructs nine distinct zones, or what he calls emotional geometries, for a nameless narrator to drift through like a shadow beneath an endless sky. The sense of space in PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY…
Heavy Feather Review 