Category: Reviews & Criticism

Cinema, a novel by Samuel Kaye, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

Long before I started writing book reviews, I had a steady (unpaid) gig writing movie reviews (and still contribute occasional, long-form film articles to DailyGrindhouse.com and Cinedump.com, for anyone who just can’t get enough of me and my sweet, sweet opinions). I have BA’s in English and Film Studies, and have written stage plays, a…
Refreshed Review: Pool Party Trap Loop, short stories by Ben Segal, reviewed by Carolyn DeCarlo

Pool Party Trap Loop is a palindrome and a nightmare. I have read Ben Segal’s explanation of the title, which involves a sweaty Victorian house party, a friend with a hankering for a cool slice of water to dive into, and a minor linguistic discovery, and while I appreciate his description I would have to…
Fugitive Assemblage, a novel by Jennifer Calkins, reviewed by Dave Karp

Jennifer Calkins’ Fugitive Assemblage is a prose-poetic narrative of a female narrator’s quest, always “on the wrong track,” to flee from present trauma and painful memory onto the roads of California, roads she will travel to both figuratively and literally bury what she has lost. The narrator surreptitiously flees the hospital, an IV in her…
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…