Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Rebecca Fishow’s Collection How to Love a Black Hole

Something is always wrong with our bodies, at least a little. Sometimes you have an ear growing out of your back. Sometimes your upper skull is removed and fastened over your face. Rebecca Fishow, author of How to Love a Black Hole, is closely attuned to these strange mutations. The collection of fabulist flash fiction…
Nonfiction Review: William Lessard Reads Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Critical Writings A Tradition of Rupture

A Tradition of Rupture collects the critical writings of an Argentine poet (1936-1972) whose life and work have come to the attention of English-speaking readers in the past decade. Not unlike the Roberto Bolaño craze of the aughts, new translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry have appeared almost every year, selling well among anglophones eager for…
“Fingers at the Tip of My Words”: Alyssa Quinn on Sulaiman Addonia’s Novel The Seers

What’s the power of a paragraph? What does a paragraph do to the sentences it binds? A paragraph break, surely, is always ideological—it carries a meta-narrative about what is connected, what is disconnected. It sifts space and time into discrete, navigable units, seeding the text with white spaces like driftwood which we might grasp amid…
Book Review: Elizabeth Zuba Visits Karla Kelsey’s Lyric-Documentary Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy

In her famed 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” science historian and feminist theorist Donna Haraway challenges the concept of objective universal knowledge and traditional approaches to science that claim a “god’s eye” lens of omniscience. Instead, she contends, all knowledge is constitutionally partial, subjective and multiple, and that only by piecing together such partial knowledges into…
Fiction Review: Morris Collins Reads Avner Landes’ Novel The Delegation

We might start by asking: what is the goal of the Jewish historical novel? Once diaspora, pogrom, and Shoah have been commemorated, if not commodified, into narrative tropes, what is the Jewish novel beyond formal pastiche? And what would a parody of the Jewish novel look like? Is the parody of the Jewish novel, just…
“What ‘Coming Home’ Truly Means”: Nicole Yurcaba Reviews Michael Ramos’ Memoir The After

Thirteen days before 9/11, Michael Ramos enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to serve as a chaplain’s bodyguard. He had no clue he would be sent to Iraq, and he embraced the posting as well as his combat service until the military determined his skillset was no longer needed. However, after his military career…
Fiction Review: Matt Robertshaw Reads Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Novel The Fun Times Brigade

It’s rare to see yourself depicted so tangibly in a novel. In many ways Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Fun Times Brigade is about me. The protagonist, Amy Scholl, is a struggling singer-songwriter turned children’s musician who is grappling with the vicissitudes of success and artistic fulfillment. Me too. She is also a parent experiencing the profound joys…
Book Review: Mitch Levenberg Reads Caroline Hagood’s Essay in Prose Poems Death and Other Speculative Fictions

There are ghosts and then there are ghosts. Caroline Hagood writes about the latter. Not the ghosts of vengeance, or the kind that make walls sweat, but ghosts of love, heartbreak, longing, the ghost within us, the ghosts lined up along the viewing stand of our unconscious minds, that both cheer and haunt us, the…
Poetry Review: Rob Stanton Reads Kimberly Lambright’s Collection Doom Glove

Kimberly Lambright’s debut collection, Ultra-Cabin, introduced a poet possessing that one thing we all—surely?—want from poetry: a genuinely original way of seeing the “nothing new.” But she also knew that a surrealism that veers too far or too quickly into the wholly other is always going to be less striking than one which remains rooted…