Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Signature Parallax”: Dustin Cole Reviews Tom Will’s You, the Viewer at Home, Moon

In Tom Will’s You, the Viewer at Home, Moon a totaled car looks like a praying mantis, love-making sounds like a string of pearls dragged down the road, and someone breathes Diesel light. It is a book of textual oddities, effortless in its fluctuation of consciousness and shifting points of view. Associations proliferate, questions deepen.…
“Haunting and Hunger”: K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want Reviewed by E.B. Schnepp

Highlighting the crossroads of desire at once familial and physical, K-Ming Chang’s lyrical and deliciously experimental short story collection, Gods of Want, evokes a haunting sort of hunger. This collection is riddled with ghosts; moving through the stories we are confronted first with the literal ghosts of the lost and departed and then increasingly by…
The Great Indoorsman, essays by Andrew Farkas, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

There are too few champions of the indoors. The word itself has been sullied by incels and agoraphobes—malcontents and the discontented—connoting loneliness and isolation, despite its unassuming etymology. The indoors have languished in the cultural backwaters of nonfiction, pushed aside for the literally (literarily?) greener pastures of the travelogue, the naturalistic essay, and texts concerning…
Stories from the Attic, previously unpublished work by William Gay, reviewed by Dawn Major

After William Gay’s passing in 2012 a mountain of unpublished work was discovered and Team Gay—a group of artists, authors, professors, scholars, basically uber fans— was formed. I came into the picture while writing my master thesis in 2016 and I reached out to the archive for more in-depth information on Gay’s writing. After I…
Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

It’s sometimes disturbing to think about the ways in which traditions evolve. Nothing, after all, starts out as a tradition. The word, by definition, carries in it the implicit understanding that an idea or act has happened a number of times, across a lengthy period, with some level of sustained intentionality. Human civilization functions around,…
Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

“Dis–”, a prefix of negation, but also of an absence or removal, serves as the backdrop of Danny Rivera’s debut chapbook Ancestral Throat, an ecclesiastical elegy to his father and primal hymn to human origin. Discharged arias, dismantling chapters, discolored diaries, distended crowns, a dismissed choir: Rivera sings the pain of impermanence as the dying…
In Memory of Memory, a novel by Maria Stepanova, reviewed by Sylwia Jurkowski

Organized chaos … or chaos that becomes slightly organized while the rest of it remains unbound. Surrealism’s allowance of the mind to wander into the illogical, to bathe in it, only to find the clear, unmistakable logic within. Let’s take the most basic definition of the word “memory” from Merriam-Webster, “the power or process of…
The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response: “No Leland, not you. You, and in…
“Dangerously Close”: Alyssa Quinn on Nina Shope’s Novel Asylum

Some books refuse to leave you unscathed; they draw you in, grip you tight, and when you get out—if you get out—you will remain forever marked. Nina Shope’s Asylum is such a book. An innovative work of historical fiction, Asylum tells the story of Louise Augustine Gleizes, a young woman diagnosed with hysteria by the…