Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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.…
And If the Woods Carry You, the third poetry collection by Erin Rodoni, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You enthralls from the start and maintains the intensity of its revelations throughout. These are poems for a world whose woods are on fire, a significant contribution to the literature grappling with our looming climate catastrophe. Rodoni’s particular genius is her powerful use of European fairy tale tropes…
Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound, a novel by Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy, reviewed by Jace Brittain

It begins with a body. Like a lot of the books and movies of the detective noir genre, we know there is a woman’s body and not much else: Michael says, I hate that she’s dead. Daniel says, I know. Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds…
Shannon Wolf on The Other Ones, a novel by Dave Housley

In Dave Housley’s newest offering from Alan Squire Publishing, a multitude of characters reckon with complacency as The Other Ones: coworkers left behind after failing to play in the lottery and watching their undeserving colleagues win big. Moving from the very concrete—the doldrums of office politics—to the abstract, strange, and disturbing—the wandering spirit of a…
Bed, a poetry collection by Elizabeth Metzger, reviewed by Ben Tripp

The fundamental operation of Elizabeth Metzger’s new short poetry collection Bed is a careful reduction: the mortar of her true life experience shines as a thing somewhat negated or at any rate sublimated and newly preserved as a partial element in this ripe synthesis, which seems to also subversively toy with the idea of poetic…
“Embodying Language”: Fani Avramopoulou on Desire and Damnation in Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door

Composed of hundreds of loosely arranged narrative fragments, Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door tells the story of Soviet immigrants haunted by a turbulent past. Moskovich takes traditions of Russian literature—namely crime fiction and a journey to hell—and spins them into a surreal world filled with violence, sex, and cryptic symbolism. The result is…
“WE NEVER SEE ANYTHING CLEARLY”: Notes on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters by Peter Valente

It is autumn and there is a chill in the air. As I write, there are major exhibits of J.M.W Turner’s work in Boston and Texas, and that brings to mind the work of John Ruskin, the writer who knew very early the importance of Turner’s paintings. As I think of Ruskin’s work, and his…