Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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,…
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…
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…
“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…
“A Disquieting Truth in Broken Hearts”: Robert Crooke Reviews Proof of Me & Other Stories by Erica Plouffe Lazure

In subtly connected tales of life in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, Erica Plouffe Lazure writes as if sharing yarns about her own extended family. She knows her people that well. And she has Eudora Welty’s sense of the way people and places determine each other’s fate. Thus, a naturalist’s field excursion in “Spawning…
What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…
Book Review: Shannon Wolf on Bud Smith’s novel Teenager

Collectively, we’ve been obsessed with the Bonnie and Clyde narrative for decades. In the 1950s, we were a nation held captive by the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in Nebraska and Wyoming. Those murders inspired the Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers in 1994. So,…