Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
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…
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.…
“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…
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…
“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…
“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…
Paul Dee Fecteau Reviews The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book! by John Reed

I did not try to cut out the artwork in John Reed’s The Family Dolls, released in book form in July by Outpost19. I am not saying it can’t be done, for I admit to being reticent with scissors due to a lack of dexterity which, among other things, makes it impossible for me to…
A Review of Michael J. Seidlinger’s Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma by Mark Ari

Michael J. Seidlinger’s new novella, Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma, opens with a definition. We’re told a runaway is “an idea, story, or mood that escapes the moment you are right in the middle of experiencing it.” Then we’re introduced to “a writer”—the only name given the protagonist—who wants to write but can’t. They’re stuck. A…