Category: Reviews & Criticism

An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a memoir by Kristin Keane, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

Memoir often serves as a vehicle for a writer—a way to recall or reconfigure a period of time or a memory. For Kristin Keane, these recollections in An Encyclopedia of Bending Time allow her to rebuild her late mother’s image, and to thin the new space between them. Grief is omnipresent here. Grief is a…
Peter Valente: Notes on the Influence of the Work of William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin on Certain Contemporary Writers

old armor because words are built into you – in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. Now try breakup up part of…
You Never Get It Back, short stories by Cara Blue Adams, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

Often, short stories are a gesture, a head nod, a breath, a whole lot of symbolism beneath every action and conversation. They’re the shadows that make up the moments of life. For another kind of writer, the short story is a microcosm. It’s a portal that opens up, sucks you in, spins you around, and…
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…