Category: Reviews & Criticism
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How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, a poetry collection by Quincy Scott Jones, reviewed by teri elam
How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, Quincy Scott Jones’ poetry collection, crawls into the bloodstream, lays in wait, inching up the heat. His is an in-your-face look at race and culture, as much eulogy as history lesson, as much elegy as admonition. Jones, incinerator and extinguisher, understands the assignment he has given, coaxing…
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“Turning the Historical Romance Novel on Its Head”: Laurie Marshall on Leah Angstman’s Out Front the Following Sea
When an historical novel is done well it works details of setting and historical context into the story so deftly that we don’t realize we are being educated. Historical novels done poorly can quickly become exposition-heavy slogs that would be well suited for kindling in a remote cottage on the Scottish moors. It is my…
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Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult, a debut novel by poet Kyle McCord, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone
Membership Where are you? On your evening off, your quiet morning, in the brief moments between longer moments of work and sleep and material responsibilities? If you are a member of the mostly secularized modern world, you’re likely looking for salves against alienation. Personal passions, pleasures, numbness, or revelry. If you’re a bit more well-balanced…
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“Whispering Dominium”: Witness and Want in Corey Van Landingham’s Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens
Lately, I have been searching for acknowledgment. I have been studying the genesis of Western universalisms, identifying the need to push back against the disembodied voice of knowledge decided upon by Western European and North American countries, by men who declared their own godlike authority, and their way of seeing and doing, as representative of…
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Deborah Bacharach on The Strategic Poet, a craft book edited by Diane Lockward
You can learn poetic craft. That’s my biggest take-away from Diane Lockward’s new book, The Strategic Poet. This shouldn’t be such a big reveal, but I made it through an entire Master’s in Creative Writing without an in-depth and systematic approach to craft. I’ve been cobbling one together ever since, including spending time with Lockward’s…
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Gentefication, a debut collection of poetry by Antonio de Jesús López, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
In April 2021, a recently elected city councilman of East Palo Alto championed for local clinics to accommodate a vulnerable, often overlooked community that reaped high COVID rates and less access to vaccines, a problem which he linked to barriers of race and language: “Immigrants and folks of color often by lack of English fluency…
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One More Number, six surreal stories by Craig Rodgers, reviewed by Alan ten-Hoeve
I first read Craig Rodgers’ stuff last spring when Death of Print resurrected his 2019 novel, The Ghost of Mile 43, from the ashes of Soft Cartel. The hopelessness and misanthropy of that book acted like a counter pressure to the pandemic malaise that had me wanting to sleep the rest of my days away.…
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“Escape from Freedom”: Vincent James Perrone Reviews Pilot, a debut collection of poetry by Danika Stegeman LeMay
“In the name of ‘freedom’ life loses all structure; it is composed of many little pieces, each separate from the other and lacking any sense as a whole. The individual is left alone with these pieces like a child with a puzzle”—Erich Fromm Body and Machine The text begins at the body—the B-o-d-i-e-s—the individual you…
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Alex Carrigan on The Smallest of Bones, a new poetry collection by Holly Lyn Walrath
The human body is one of the most complex natural structures in the world. Nearly every part of the body is designed with a purpose and functions without the person thinking too much about how they breathe or see. To deconstruct the body is to try to understand how the body does what it does,…
Heavy Feather Review 