Category: Reviews & Criticism

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.…
“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…
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,…
My Dead Book, a novel by Nate Lippens, reviewed by Shane Jesse Christmass

Nate Lippens’ first novel is an instant classic and personal favorite, an honorific remembrance of people who have passed, collections and fragments of memory, where shower curtains look like used condoms, and clothes are more sealant than fabric: The bathroom was tiny and had a shower stall with a plastic curtain that looked like a…
Glass Bikini, a new poetry collection by Kristin Bock, reviewed by Michael Kleiza

To enter Kristin Bock’s world is to fall off a precipice, get sucked into a black hole of the weird, and then come out the other side even weirder. She transforms a world you know into one so surreal, it flies past you only to reverse and collide with the back of your head, implanting…
Dave Fitzgerlad Reviews Amygdalatropolis, a novel by B.R. Yeager

For the first few pages, I thought B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis was some kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Its protagonist, /1404er/, exists in a hermetic, digital world populated entirely by other formless entities who share the name /1404er/, and his interactions therein revolve entirely around the sharing and discussion (and eventually, creation) of only the absolute ugliest,…
Kinderkrankenhaus, a play by Jesi Bender, reviewed by Andrew Farkas

Children’s literature, television, entertainment (in general) used to be weird. We could go all the way back to William Blake, Lewis Carroll, and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” sure. But then, when I was in graduate school, I was sent reeling one day when some of my peers were angered and even confused by metafiction because,…
Search History, a new novel by Eugene Lim, reviewed by Michael Wong

There’s a line in Eugene Lim’s Search History that is repeated several times throughout the novel. A character declares something they’ve heard impossible and their interlocutor quickly retorts: “Of course it isn’t.” And the matter, whatever it is, is simply left at that. It’s a refrain that tells us a bit about the characters involved,…
ANGEL HOUSE, a novel by David Leo Rice, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

ANGEL HOUSE is the kind of novel that will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and indeed, will likely mean something different to me if I read it again in a few years, and yet again if I read it a third time somewhere down the line (all distinct possibilities). Because of this, I’ll go ahead…