Category: Reviews & Criticism

Music Is Over!, a novella by Ben Arzate, reviewed by Carl Fuerst

In 2013, I visited my brother in NYC, where he’d moved to pursue a career as a chef. I was a lifelong Midwesterner, and I imagined that the New York City subways wouldn’t be much different than the Red Line in Chicago. But this was fundamentally different. Before the pandemic began, nearly 5.5 million people…
“Sometimes You Wanna Go Where Nobody Knows Anybody’s Name”: Dustin Holland on Steve Aylett’s Hyperthick #1

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Picking up a piece of Steve Aylett’s work for the first time is always a confounding experience. His prose and his comics are often inscrutable blends of genres and mediums that wear their influences proudly on their sleeves while being unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered. The…
I Failed to Swoon, a poetry collection by Nadia de Vries, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou

Nadia de Vries’ I Failed to Swoon is a slim collection of poems that are by turns playful, brutal, and aloof. The poems in this collection are short—some of them no longer than Tweets. Much of the language invokes tropes of internet speech: droll one-liners, self-assured aphorisms, jaded indifference, and cliché. de Vries unsettles the…
La Serenissima, a poetry collection by Wallace Barker, reviewed by Donald Ryan

Wallace Barker’s La Serenissima from Gob Pile Press. 19 chapters. 19 vacations. Each poem a single sentence, less than a page, recounting moments in instances. Like photographs in a family album, the poems are souvenirs. You may not know the people in the picture or what’s taking place in the background, but within each frame…
Condemned to Cymru, a novel by M.J. Nicholls, reviewed by Eric Williams

M.J. Nicholls’ new novel Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. It even affects the Rabelaisian flourish of an artificial structure—the story is mostly presented as one pathetic misanthrope’s alphabetized travelogue (of sorts) of Wales, written for a sinister Icelandic thinktank…
Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…
An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a memoir by Kristin Keane, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

Memoir often serves as a vehicle for a writer—a way to recall or reconfigure a period of time or a memory. For Kristin Keane, these recollections in An Encyclopedia of Bending Time allow her to rebuild her late mother’s image, and to thin the new space between them. Grief is omnipresent here. Grief is a…
Peter Valente: Notes on the Influence of the Work of William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin on Certain Contemporary Writers

old armor because words are built into you – in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. Now try breakup up part of…
You Never Get It Back, short stories by Cara Blue Adams, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

Often, short stories are a gesture, a head nod, a breath, a whole lot of symbolism beneath every action and conversation. They’re the shadows that make up the moments of life. For another kind of writer, the short story is a microcosm. It’s a portal that opens up, sucks you in, spins you around, and…