Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“Capturing the Is-ness of Liminal Events”: Avinash Rajendran’s Dual Review of Rites and Thin Places
“What are these dark days I see in this world so badly bent … How much longer can it last? How long can it go on?” Dylan asks prophetically in his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a question that has endured in our collective imagination for two years now. The Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci…
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The Pit, and No Other Stories, short stories by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell
Small towns carry with them idyllic scenes of easy living, tight-knit communities, and happy families. Most of the inhabitants are not new; instead, generations often run deeper than the town wells and reservoirs. But once a bit of the surface paint chips off, the ugliness underneath begins to show. What happens when a town with…
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David Leo Rice’s New Novel The New House, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald
My wife and I still talk often about the term “art monster”—first coined in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, and introduced to us via Claire Dederer’s 2017 Paris Review article “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” (we don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse, my wife and I).…
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“Hewing Hope from Despair”: Sonia Greenfield Reviews Michael Kleber-Diggs’ Worldly Things
There is a great deal to be learned from reading Michael Kleber-Diggs’ Worldly Things. Like how to write a poem that means it, for example. There is a precision to his work, which makes each of his poems feel like a gift because of the care that was put into their composition. His poem, “Seismic…
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Deliver Thy Pigs, a debut novel by Joey Hedger, reviewed by Jesse Hilson
We’re often told by craftsmen that “a piece of fiction needs conflict.” Some novels have such a faint outline of what drives a conflict that we must deduce it from clues buried under literary sediment. The struggle is abstract and internal and deep. Not so with Deliver Thy Pigs, the sturdy, workmanlike debut novel by…
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“A Person’s Life Is Political”: Notes on David Wojnarowicz’s Work by Peter Valente
I’d always felt an alienation from the “art” world as well as the alienation from the forward thrust of civilization. —David Wojnarowicz On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. It was an unprovoked attack that shocked the European community. As of this writing, Putin continues to attack the Ukrainian people, who have shown great resistance,…
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Two Murals, a poetry collection by Jesús Castillo, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
Gracing the cover of Jesús Castillo’s latest book Two Murals is a bi-sectioned black-and-white image: half a fingerprint merged with half a section of tree rings. Both signify the natural coding system for each of these organisms and are conjoined to suggest inherent connectedness. This symbiosis is the theme that underscores Two Murals: humans’ relationship…
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Whatever Feels Like Home, a flash fiction collection by Susan Rukeyser, reviewed by Alice Kaltman
Susan Rukeyser’s new chapbook may be short in stature, a mere twenty pages, but there is nothing slim about the rich, emotionally resonant prose within. Whatever Feels Like Home reads like a songbook, each of the ten stories, melodic and masterful, ask that age-old query; What truly is home? With Rukeyser at the helm, the…
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“Maternal Monsters”: E.B. Schnepp Reviews Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross
Michelle Ross’ second collection, Shapeshifting, can only be described as a procession of horrifying transformations. More specifically, this is a series of horrifying female transformations that reveal with startling clarity the lack of agency that comes from existing in a feminine body, particularly when it comes to childbearing and its corresponding vulnerabilities. This transformation is demonstrated…
Heavy Feather Review 