Category: Reviews & Criticism

Nonfiction Review: Asha Dore on Lidia Yuknavitch’s Memoir Reading the Waves

Like many of Lidia Yuknavitch’s readers, I was once her student. I met Yuknavitch first through The Chronology of Water, a book that gave me permission to abandon literary structure in a way that made memoir feel closer to telling the truth. When I found out she’d be heading the nonfiction program at Eastern Oregon…
“Being Alive Is Just One Way of Being Alive”: Grant Gerald Miller on Alan Michael Parker’s New Story Collection Bingo, Bango, Boingo

I left Memphis for Olympia, Washington, on the Amtrak with $200 tucked inside a copy of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I had never heard of Kenneth Patchen. The bold, abstract cover designed by the groundbreaking New Directions designer Alvin Lustig caught my eye. But it was the title that truly captivated me: The Journal…
Poetry Review: Thoughts on Uche Nduka’s Bainbridge Island Notebook by Peter Valente

Uche Nduka explores the nature of eros and the political in terms of our present world. Desire that points to any utopic vision of an alternate world is often compromised by cultural and ideological factors. Pleasure is often tainted by class, power plays, and gender wars. We are a product of our time and perhaps…
Book Review: Anthony Borruso Reads Chris Campanioni’s Hybrid Text north by north/west

Despite its directional title, Chris Campanioni’s hybrid text north by north/west: (an attention to frequency) is a virtuosic linguistic collage that, more often than not, indulges in indirection and subversion. Taking inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, who was known for his narrative deception and generic subterfuge (even going so far as to kill off his leading…
Fiction Review: Asha Dore Reads Em J Parsley’s Novella You, from Below

In Em J Parsley’s You, from Below, the speaker climbs an Appalachian mountain to deliver an envelope after their holler town falls apart. The speaker is the only survivor. Along the way, they meet folks and gather their stories of “rapture and decay.” This slim novella punches lyrically through landslides and loss, punctuated by often…
Fiction Review: Tara Van De Mark Reads Diana Oropeza’s Debut Collection An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance by Diana Oropeza arrived by mail, slipped out of the envelope, through my hands, and onto the hallway floor. The size of a passport, it landed next to a banana peel and a pile of junk mail and I worried that this treasure would, like the subject it ponders, disappear. Instead, it…
New Music Essay: “How I Got into Free Improvisation” by Peter Valente

I remember as a teenager living in Fairview, NJ, and going down to the corner store and finding a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s Art of the Improvisors. I grew up listening to classical music and opera and I knew there was something about the sound of free jazz that I liked but it would be…
Fiction Review: Andrew Fort Reads Dustin M. Hoffman’s Collection Such a Good Man

Whose America is it? The subject of Dustin M. Hoffman’s collection Such a Good Man is, by sheer percentage, masculinity in Middle America. Represented here are good fathers, bad fathers, and in-between fathers. There are husbands who are trying hard and husbands who aren’t trying very much at all. There are laborers, house painters, framers,…
Book Review: Beau Farris Enters the Orbit of Monica Ong’s Visual Poetry Collection Planetaria

In Monica Ong’s newest book of visual poetry, Planetaria, she doesn’t just write poems, she constructs systems. Drawing from astronomical charts, family photographs, speculative science, and myth, Ong builds a constellation of visual devices that call us into orbit. Her poems are not static pages but interactive mechanisms; volvelles, planispheres, and family photographs shape the…