Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Et In Suburbia Ego”: Andrew Farkas Reviews Aimee Parkison’s short fiction collection Suburban Death Project

The suburbs are supposed to be safety incarnate. Originally, they were more closely associated with urban areas, though removed from the inner city where everyone lives so close together, where anything can happen. As the suburbs pushed out farther and farther, as their design plans rejected grids for labyrinths ending in cul-de-sacs, they became their…
Cavanaugh, a new novel by Joshua Kornreich, reviewed by Pedro Ponce

Is it too soon to revisit the Brett Kavanaugh story? I wondered this as I became immersed in the world of Cavanaugh, the latest from novelist Joshua Kornreich. Last year’s American Crime Story: Impeachment (2021) proves that waiting pays off when adapting stories from the headlines. More than two decades later, Ryan Murphy’s retelling of…
“Longed for as a Memory”: Anne Graue on Millicent Borges Accardi’s Through a Grainy Landscape

The opening poem, “A Man Sleeps, the Skies Move,” sets the tone of Millicent Borges Accardi’s poetry collection, Through a Grainy Landscape—one of imminent worry and portent, one of the sadness of memory and admissions of guilt, one of the realities of life “that it is what it is.” The speaker tells a child, “Please,…
“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…
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…
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).…
“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…
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…
“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,…