Category: Reviews & Criticism
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And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, a poetry collection by Amy Beeder, reviewed by David Epstein
When Polish-born Joseph Conrad was asked why he wrote in English, he said “Because Flaubert was already writing in French.” That’s the risk you’ll take reading Amy Beeder’s And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey: that you’ll want to find another language to write in because there’s no way you can possibly compete with…
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In the Antarctic Circle, prose poems by Dennis James Sweeney, reviewed by Marin Killen
Dennis James Sweeney’s writing in In the Antarctic Circle (described as “hybrid narrative prose poems” by Autumn House Press) makes stillness, silence, and formlessness visible. Whiteness is both the inviting emptiness of a blank page waiting to be marked, and the terror of an unmappable landscape. The narrator and their only companion, Hank, stagger through…
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Saturday Morning Chapbook: Chase Burke’s Lecture (Paper Nautilus) reviewed by Nick Almeida
Chase Burke’s stunning chapbook Lecture (Paper Nautilus Press) is filled with tumbledown geniuses. Armor is a recurrent image, and penmanship hurts. These narrators are, as you perhaps guessed, vulnerable in the way a good teacher might be. Okay, good may be the wrong word. These are the swept-up sort of lecturers, their pockets filled with…
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“What’s Missing?”: Benjamin Kinney on the Quest for Identity in Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone
Joshua Schulman is a modern-day Pac-Man: powering his way through a path he cannot predict, all while being haunted by ghosts of his past. At the beginning of Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone, Joshua is collecting more retro video games than he will ever be able to play; thinking about his…
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Newer Testaments, a novel by Philip Brunetti, reviewed by Nora E. Webb
Beautiful, haunting, and decidedly subversive, Newer Testaments invites us to explore the metaphysical, the hypothetical, and the hallucinatory. It follows an unnamed narrator in his journey of escape—first from the Facility to which he admits himself, and then (yet also simultaneously), from the compelling need to write his continuation of “The Revelation of John.” Our…
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Frederick Arias: Opera kitsch for Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede by Mike Corrao
Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede emphasizes the ludological role of abstract anatomies and how they project different erotic instances from the artificial carapace that those bodies redesign in the act of reading through their garments and organs. In the rhizomatic level of the composition of the text, those organisms reduplicate themselves as they…
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Esteban Rodríguez Reviews Edinburgh Notebook, an Action Books poetry collection by Valerie Mejer Caso
There is no telling what anyone’s reaction to death will be, but for many putting pen to paper helps process the void that is felt in someone’s absence. For Valerie Mejer Caso, Edinburgh Notebook is a testament to the power of language’s ability to heal and to help come close to answering the questions we…
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Maria Judnick Reviews Call It Horses, a Dzanc Books epistolary road novel by Jessie van Eerden
“I write you about the dead. I write you to stay alive and, after all this time, I write you, still, to become myself.” The opening page of Jessie van Eerden’s latest book Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize, draws us into this compelling epistolary novel that the narrator Frankie is…
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“The Seedier Angels of Our Nature”: Derek Maine on Reading Body High by Jon Lindsey
Los Angeles is an almost incomprehensively vast place. The expanse opens up a world of nooks, crannies, and hiding places for the seedier angels of our nature to roam. In The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s brilliant 1939 Hollywood novel, the scaffolding of celebrity and glamour coating the myth of Los Angeles is torn…
Heavy Feather Review 