Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Inheritances of Hunger, a debut chapbook by Stella Lei, reviewed by Daisuke Shen
Secrets serve as our guides to navigate the world of Stella Lei’s first chapbook, Inheritances of Hunger. But secrets are only granted once one has proven themselves to be worthy of Lei’s trust—do we know how to hold her narrators’ hurt, to engage with it as if our own? Masochism and sacrifice form the foundations…
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Terminal Park, a novel by Gary J. Shipley, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald
How do you write about the meaning behind a book whose core subject is essentially the end of meaning? How do you encapsulate a book that struggles to contain itself? That churns, and roils, and seeps off of every page until its typeface is practically crawling up your arms and invading your orifices like the…
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Shannon Wolf on Refuse to be Done, a craft book by Matt Bell
In perhaps the craft book to end all other craft books, Matt Bell implores us to take ownership of our writing, to stop and take a second, third, hundredth look, and above all, to Refuse to Be Done—at least until we’re actually genuinely done with a manuscript and ready to kick it from the nest.…
Heavy Feather Review 