Category: Reviews & Criticism

Weeping in the Tropical Moonlight Because Nobody’s Told Her, a poetry book by Fox Henry Frazier, reviewed by Hillary Leftwich

each new world I’d built within you wrecked, each flower wilting & infectedYou’re being protected Fox Henry Frazier’s poetry collection, Weeping in the Tropical Moonlit Night Because Nobody’s Told Her, fulfills its title’s expectations with a dreamy, surreal quality I’ve been craving in the world of poetry to come into existence. With subtle waves of images…
The New Existence, a novel by Michael Collins, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

Americans in their cars. Even in cities blessed with workable public transit, the car remains ubiquitous in the image of America. The highway sprawls, the careening suburban neighborhoods, the gridded urban avenues. And in our cars, we become singular, lone pod-people encapsulated and resolute in our isolation, only likely to make contact with others through…
“Elle Nash’s Gag Reflex: An (All Too) Human Response to a Nietzschean Sickness,” a review by Charlene Elsby

The first time I saw Elle Nash actually in motion (as opposed to in the static images on social media), she was a presenter on a panel with Kerry St. Laurent, B.R. Yeager, and Burial Grid, hosted by Gallery A3 (on Zoom). The discussion was good, and they covered many significant things about interdisciplinary collaborations…
The Observant, Ravi Mangla’s second novel, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In his second novel, The Observant, Ravi Mangla takes us into the trappings—both literally and figuratively—of a world fueled by luxury and power, but stripped of real agency. While filming in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, moderately reputed documentary filmmaker Vasant Rai is kidnapped and held captive in a stark prison on erroneous, underexplained charges…
Everything Is Totally Fine, a fiction collection by Zac Smith, reviewed by Michael G. Barilleaux

Everything Is Totally Fine by Zac Smith is a short fiction experience like few others in independent literature. What’s perhaps most engaging about Smith’s collection is not just that it proves its anxiety ridden title to be entirely ironic, but rather that it gives us a chance to reflect on the reality of this irony while…
“It Shimmers”: Matthew Kinlin Reflects on Derek McCormack’s Judy Blame’s Obituary

Derek McCormack’s Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death is a furious haberdashery of his own shining and ghostly obsessions. When writing about fashion, McCormack is writing about his life. Fashion is a glittering, inaccessible mirage like Kafka’s castle covered in rhinestones. Our exclusion from glamour is the push-pull of our own hearts beating.…
Mount Summer, a short story collection by Travis Dahlke, reviewed by Marin Killen

Mount Summer is the collaborative product of Travis Dahlke, Jeff Dragan, and John Shields—writer, musician, and illustrator respectively. Produced by “the literary arm” of Out to Lunch Records, Lunch Break Zine, Mount Summer falls into the category of “extra-musical,” and accordingly the texture and sound of the prose stands out as well as the accompanying…
Revenge of the Scapegoat, a satirical novel by Caren Beilin, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat begins and ends in a café in Philadelphia, where the protagonist, Iris, waits for her friend Ray. The two scenes are eerily similar, down to Iris’ outfits and the presence of flying insects around their table. And both sections open with a single, stand-alone sentence: “I was upset.” Iris’…
Capricorn, Venus Descendant, 50 poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, reviewed by Cinda Coggins Mosher

I first encountered Michael Joyce’s work in 1998, in a graduate seminar at the University of Iowa on hypertext fiction featuring such works of his as Of Two Minds, Afternoon (“the granddaddy of hypertext fictions”), Twilight: A Symphony, and Twelve Blue. The highlight of this course, and of my graduate studies as a whole, was the…