Category: Reviews & Criticism

And Then the Gray Heaven, a novel by RE Katz, reviewed by Lillian Barfield

And Then the Gray Heaven by RE Katz centers around Jules, a queer young adult who has emerged from foster systems and displaced homes, and chronicles their journey as they deal with the quick and unexpected death of their partner, B. While B’s family disapproves of the relationship, Jules finds their own way of dealing…
A Review of Alice Kaltman’s Dawg Towne by Alexandra Pennington

Alice Kaltman’s novel Dawg Towne features interchangeable narrative perspectives among six members of the tiny suburban Towne who each offer a different glimpse into the rich and complex connections made between man and canine. The central conflict of the novel features a young dognapper; she believes she is a social justice warrior who is saving…
Queenzenglish.mp3, a poetry | philosophy | performativity anthology edited by Kyoo Lee, reviewed by Ben Tripp

Most publishers now are more risk-averse than ever. And this while also, globally, we are led to believe that English still reigns somehow more or less undisputed as the one language that; as Kyoo Lee writes, “everyone comes to inhabit … [everyone] gets enmeshed Englishly, how, when, and where does it grow?” The answers presented…
A Thousand Curves, a Red Mountain Editor’s Choice Award-winning poetry collection by Paul Nemser, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

Paul Nemser’s childhood connection to poetry began in Portland, Oregon, where he passed the time reading poems in the storage room of his family’s tool store. From there, he went on to receive a BA from Harvard College, an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, and a JD from Boston University School of…
Peter Valente: “Notes on John Wieners’ ‘A Poem for Painters’” (Selected Poems 1958-1984), written after reading Bill Berkson’s Sudden Address

In “A Poem for Painters,” John Wieners writes: Paul Klee scratched for seven yearson smoked glass, to develophis line, LaVigne says, lookat his face! He who has spentall night drawing mine. In his diary of 1906, Klee wrote about his “reverse glass paintings,”: “Besides, I moved with the utmost zeal on the smoothest surface, on…
Becca Yenser on Reading Brian Phillip Whalen’s Semiotic Love [Stories]

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” So writes Joan Didion in her book, The White Album. That statement holds true for Semiotic Love [Stories], in which Brian Phillip Whalen meticulously records his losses like a man trying to save his life. In a series of vignettes, Whalen transmits signals of grief like a…
“the company of everything”: Sarah D’Stair Reviews Cemetery Ink by Mihaela Moscaliuc

Elemental. That’s how this book feels. Each new verse, sound, phrase, and image seems foundational, building a life, then living and breathing in it. Mihaela Moscaliuc’s Cemetery Ink excavates the historical and the quotidian in equal measure—the dignities and indignities housed in single bodies; motherhood and its cruel complicities; the visions, loves, terrors, intimacies, and…
Justin Sun Reviews prepoems in postpanish and other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Victor Rodríguez Núñez

On the home page of jorgenriqueadoum.com, there is a rotating carousel of pictures. Jorgenrique Adoum lighting a cigar, Jorgenrique Adoum smiling. Printed across these pictures are three quotes: one of Adoum’s shorter poems in its entirety and excerpts from two others. Which strikes me now as ironic. Since, as I made my way through Katherine…
Nemerov’s Door, an essay collection by Robert Wrigley, reviewed by Francesca Moroney

I’ve come to contemporary poetry late in my life. Just a few years shy of half a decade, I began to study its craft—both as a reader and as a writer. I was first introduced to the brilliance of Robert Wrigley’s work through his poem “Ode to My Boots,” from Anatomy of Melancholy and Other…

Category: Reviews & Criticism

And Then the Gray Heaven, a novel by RE Katz, reviewed by Lillian Barfield

A Review of Alice Kaltman’s Dawg Towne by Alexandra Pennington

Queenzenglish.mp3, a poetry | philosophy | performativity anthology edited by Kyoo Lee, reviewed by Ben Tripp

A Thousand Curves, a Red Mountain Editor’s Choice Award-winning poetry collection by Paul Nemser, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

Peter Valente: “Notes on John Wieners’ ‘A Poem for Painters’” (Selected Poems 1958-1984), written after reading Bill Berkson’s Sudden Address

Becca Yenser on Reading Brian Phillip Whalen’s Semiotic Love [Stories]

“the company of everything”: Sarah D’Stair Reviews Cemetery Ink by Mihaela Moscaliuc

Justin Sun Reviews prepoems in postpanish and other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Victor Rodríguez Núñez

Nemerov’s Door, an essay collection by Robert Wrigley, reviewed by Francesca Moroney