Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“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…
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“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…
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“What Their Spirits Have Denied”: Robert Crooke Reviews A Heaven of Their Choosing by Joann Smith
Many of the elegant stories in Joann Smith’s debut collection turn on moments of sudden insight. In “Phlebotomist’s Day” a dissatisfied wife awaits her biopsy result and confronts the subtle reluctance of her spirit to know itself. A young mother struggling with an adopted toddler’s nightly terrors faces her own spiritual attachment disorder in “You’re…
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Dave Fitzgerald on Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell
One of the first things I did after the initial wave of COVID-19 sent me and my 10,000 some-odd coworkers at the gargantuan state university where I work scurrying home for almost five months of quarantine, was pull The Brothers Karamazov down off my bookshelf—one of those dauntingly hefty classics that I’d always meant to…
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Stephen Daly Reviews Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s Nowadays and Lonelier
Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s Nowadays and Lonelier lives up to its title—it is a book our times and the recent past—a world of alienation, dysfunction, misery, despair. Gray-Cosgrove’s finely-honed senses seemingly absorb all she encounters, and when she writes, all of these sensorial observations are put on the page, and we are right where she wants us.…
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“In Praise of Quiet Things”: Jesi Buell’s Review of Karen Shangguan’s Graphic Novel Quiet Thoughts
*Ed.’s Note: click on images to view larger sizes. “There is natural poetry in stillness” The world wants you to be loud. With so many people and so much competition, we’re taught that in order to be heard, we have to speak the loudest and be the most outrageous. Writers in particular are taught to…
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Henry’s Chapel, a novel by Graham Guest, reviewed by Christopher Lura
If we are to take Graham Guest’s new book Henry’s Chapel as a novel—and it is a novel, let’s be clear—it might be described like this: it is a story of a group of people—of a family, for lack of a better word—living off the grid somewhere in the backwoods of East Texas. There are children—Henry, an…
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“Plastic Ecologies, Plastic Lives: Sam Taylor’s The Book of Fools” by Patrick Thomas Henry
In his new hybrid-form collection The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse, Sam Taylor charts an eco-poetics that frames the remote atolls of the self against the present calamities of climate change. Taylor’s tools for this creative cartography are found forms, lyrical essays, visual experiments, and the accumulated detritus of culture, from…
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“We, the Source”: Tara Ballard on the Resilience of Women in Maggie Queeney’s settler
In “Homestead,” Maggie Queeney writes: “We settled where stranded: / the hollow / Where the horse fell leg-by-leg” and “Now what holds us / Is the sweet water-swelled well”; before illustrating “the shape made of two bodies—one arm / Coiled round the other held down.” Like the well keeping the unnamed “us” of the poem…
Heavy Feather Review 