Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…
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…
“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…
“And in a Heap Cam on Them with a Swack”: Notes by Peter Valente on a Few Passages in Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid with Examples of Its influence on Modernist Poetry

With new translations of Virgil’s Aeneid appearing last year, Shadi Bartsch’s translation of 2021 (only the second English translation from a woman; the first was by Sarah Ruden in 2009) and David Hadbawnik’s translation, which was published this past August, I thought it would be interesting to examine passages from the first English rendering of…
“I Drive, Therefore I Am”: Michael Quinn Reviews Today in the Taxi by Sean Singer

Born in Mexico in 1974, former New York City taxi driver Sean Singer recalls his time behind the wheel in his wryly humorous third poetry collection Today in the Taxi. Almost all of these prose poems begin “Today in the taxi” and follow the same structure: from the observational (who he’s driving) to the existential…
“Gatsby Goes Public”: A Critical Essay by Robert Crooke about America’s All-Time Favorite Novel

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s highly-praised and ultimately best-selling novel entered the “public domain” as of January 1, 2021, after 95 years of copyright protection. What happened to Fitzgerald and his subtle, gossamer web of a story during that century is as interesting as the novel itself, given how perfectly the real-life tale confirms…