Category: Reviews & Criticism
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“Stubborn Laughter”: Robert Dunsdon Reviews The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha
Some poor fellow jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. “Mid-air,” says Iliana Rocha, “his bones split & feathered—he was lightness. His bones were braided wheat. Bones collapsed like a birdhouse of Popsicle sticks. He said his hands transmuted into doves, in a constant state of ascent like an apology.” These irresistible lines are but a…
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“The Field of What Is Unsaid”: A Review of Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast by Hannah Riffell
Longing is universal, and heartbreak is as common as the cold, as any scanning of the literary canon will reveal. What the poet Lisa Hiton recognizes, however, is that the landscapes on which these universal longings unfold are wonderfully impressionistic, to the point of being somewhat unknowable to anyone besides one’s self. In Afterfeast, Hiton’s…
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“Polarities of Love”: A Review of The Pact, poems by Jennifer Militello, by Aline Soules
Love. How does it manifest itself? How many kinds are there? What are its extremes? With The Pact, Jennifer Militello explores love through imagery, language, and leaps. She never blinks and investigates the subject from its outer edges to its core. The book is framed by two poems: “Agape Feast” and “Ode to Love.” In…
Heavy Feather Review 