Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, a collection by Jackson Bliss, reviewed by Titus Chalk
In Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, Jackson Bliss sets out to stun. Each of the 13 stories in this collection (and the interstitial texts between them) is a reimagining of what a story might be, a subversion of form, a feat of linguistic pyrotechnics, that often portrays mixed-race identity or attempts to establish a…
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Psychros, a CLASH Books novel by Charlene Elsby, reviewed by Alex Carrigan
When a person commits suicide, is it merely the final event of the victim’s life, or is it actually the first event in the remainder of the lives of those they left behind? The act of ending one’s life is never just a singular choice, but the result of numerous choices that doesn’t leave just…
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“A Dream of Trees and Television and Ghosts,” a nonfiction excerpt from Sarah Kornfield’s The True: A Trilogy of Ghosts
“A Trilogy of Ghosts” is a composite of three books called The True. In 2019, world-renowned Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie died, the news shocking the creative world. Bringing Darie and Romania vividly to life, The True also tells the story of one courageous woman’s cutting through a con artist’s web of lies that mirror global corruption.…
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Maison Cristina, a novel by Eugene K. Garber, reviewed by Francis X. Fitzpatrick
Author Eugene K. Garber spins some very dark and grim fairy tales in his neo-Gothic novel Maison Cristina, but does allow occasional light and laughter to enter this supernatural story. The novel opens with the image of a dead man lying at the bottom of a cliff while another man looks down from above. We…
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“Logan Berry and the Negative Beyond”: A Review of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake by Charlene Elsby
If we’re going to talk about Logan Berry, the question we first need to answer is, how is Cioran’s fall out of time conceived of as a negative eternity? The key concept is to differentiate the fall out of time from a positive eternity. The fall out of time is not a happy return to…
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Playlist for the Apocalypse, a new book of poems by Rita Dove, reviewed by Carolyn Oliver
Playlist for the Apocalypse is Rita Dove’s first book of new poems since 2009’s virtuoso Sonata Mulattica (her Collected Poems: 1974–2004, also from W. W. Norton & Company, appeared in 2016), and well worth the twelve-year wait. Expansive in theme, tone, and subject matter across its six sections, Playlist for the Apocalypse defies generalization and…
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“To What End?”: Lorenzo Bartolucci on A Room in Dodge City, Vol. 2: The Blut Branson Era, a novel-in-vignettes by David Leo Rice
Why do you want to be a writer? It came up casually, over dinner, but I’ll never forget the way David Leo Rice paused (rather uncharacteristically) to consider a question he didn’t seem to have bothered with overmuch on his own—which may be the simplest definition of a vocation, after all. And I’ll never forget…
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The Pastor, a novel by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed by Titus Chalk
For Liv, the titular pastor in Hanne Ørstavik’s 2004 novel—translated from the Norwegian for the first time by Martin Aitken—language is the original sin. Indeed, God spoke the world into being, perhaps why Liv’s faith is wafer-thin, and why she so is deeply troubled by the violence inherent in language, the binaries it creates, the…
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“Taking Liberties”: Four Views of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, a review by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
1. What It Is In her 2011 book The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson argued that “true moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance.” Her latest, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,…
Heavy Feather Review 