Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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…