Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Stubborn Laughter”: Robert Dunsdon Reviews The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha

Some poor fellow jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. “Mid-air,” says Iliana Rocha, “his bones split & feathered—he was lightness. His bones were braided wheat. Bones collapsed like a birdhouse of Popsicle sticks. He said his hands transmuted into doves, in a constant state of ascent like an apology.” These irresistible lines are but a…
“The Field of What Is Unsaid”: A Review of Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast by Hannah Riffell

Longing is universal, and heartbreak is as common as the cold, as any scanning of the literary canon will reveal. What the poet Lisa Hiton recognizes, however, is that the landscapes on which these universal longings unfold are wonderfully impressionistic, to the point of being somewhat unknowable to anyone besides one’s self. In Afterfeast, Hiton’s…
“Polarities of Love”: A Review of The Pact, poems by Jennifer Militello, by Aline Soules

Love. How does it manifest itself? How many kinds are there? What are its extremes? With The Pact, Jennifer Militello explores love through imagery, language, and leaps. She never blinks and investigates the subject from its outer edges to its core. The book is framed by two poems: “Agape Feast” and “Ode to Love.” In…
Titus Chalk on Sterling Karat Gold, an award-winning experimental novel by Isabel Waidner

Isabel Waidner’s Goldsmith Prize-winning new novel is a cri de coeur from a Tory Britain battered by inequities. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 and prescribed brutal spending cuts as an antidote to the Financial Crisis, the country has become a callous place. But worse, since the 2016 Brexit referendum emboldened charlatans, liars,…
“Notes on Ann Lewinson’s Still Life with Meredith,” a book review by Peter Valente

Ann Lewinson’s novella Still Life with Meredith is fantastically perverse, erudite, essayistic, and precise as a laser as it navigates high and low cultures and literatures. With the passionate eye of a critic, the narrator flirts with Lacan and Derrida and with raw sexual language. The result is a novella that is funny, bizarre, unhinged,…
The Celestial Bandit, a tribute anthology to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell

Some writers’ legends are so large that they are usually read about rather than read. The author’s work takes on such a large, imposing existence that intimidates us and forces us to learn about the work through the life that produced the words; Joyce, Proust, Kerouac, to name a few. Oftentimes the life behind the…
Selected Poems by Michael Gottlieb, reviewed by Steven Fraccaro

Michael Gottlieb’s concerns are striking in their intensity—I was tempted to write his “poetic concerns,” but they are more than that, if one may say so. In commenting on his work, the author has enumerated his themes as language, the city, and the life poets face. This is accurate, as far as it goes. But…
An Impossible Love, a novel by Christine Angot, reviewed by Titus Chalk

Christine Angot’s latest novel to appear in English, An Impossible Love, is an elusive read. Slippery to pin down in terms of its genre, the story also transforms in our hands after a pivotal reveal recontextualizes everything that comes before it. Not only the story’s content, but Angot’s aesthetic, too. Without wanting to give too…
“Maggie Siebert’s Dead Kitten as the Persecution of Consciousness by Reality’s Imitation of Eternity”: Charlene Elsby’s Review of Bonding

“Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” is the final story in Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t leave you, because it elucidates something fundamental to the persistence of the terrible—a fundamental premise we know to be true, but which isn’t made explicit except by madmen and metaphysicians. Maggie…