Category: Reviews & Criticism
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The Part That Burns, a Split/Lip Press memoir in fragments by Jeannine Ouellette, reviewed by Lisa Elaine Low
This beautifully written book feels as much like a novel as a memoir. In it Jeannine Ouellette narrates the arc of a difficult life from childhood to the memoir’s present, about age fifty. By book’s end, Ouellette’s three children have grown up, moved out, and begun lives of their own. Ouellette suffers such unkindness as…
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Naya Clark on Kim Chinquee’s SNOWDOG, a Ravenna Press flash fiction collection
At the crux of many people living in the humdrum of isolation and taking in stories quickly through social media, the “queen” of flash fiction Kim Chinquee’s new collection SNOWDOG satisfies taking in the brief and wandering details of everyday life. Oddly enough, the connecting factor isn’t solely people. Nearly every story within SNOWDOG features…
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I AM THIS STATE OF EMERGENCY, a debut poetry collection by Robin Myrick, reviewed by Janet Sarbanes (Surveyor Books)
In the late nineteen-sixties, composer Pauline Oliveros began a series of “Sonic Meditations,” early experiments in score-based deep listening that encouraged small groups of participants to listen attentively to their environments. “Take a walk at night,” reads one score. “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” As Kerry O’Brien notes, Oliveros…
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Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society, a 7.13 Books fiction collection by Ross Wilcox, reviewed by Rachel Rueckert
Ross Wilcox’s recent collection of stories, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society, presents some of the most delightfully strange fiction I’ve read to date. Wilcox seems to entertain our private What ifs? before rending these possibilities as sharp, suspenseful, and wildly amusing scenes where we are surprised to recognize ourselves in some of the most unlikely…
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Heck, Texas, an Atlatl Press travelogue by Tex Gresham, reviewed by Eric Aldrich
“I’ll start my review of Tex Gresham’s Heck, Texas with a contrast,” I thought. “I’ll look up some wholesome facts about Jasper, Texas, the community profiled in the book, and then highlight ways the town’s officially-projected personality differed from Gresham’s caricature of it.” This was the idea, but it took nothing more than Wikipedia to…
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Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach on Jake Syersak’s VORTEX(T) (COAST|noCOAST)
Was William Wordsworth a Terminator sent back to the 18th century by Skynet to induce the self-defeating anthropocentric solipsism? A solipsism inherent in his oft-misquoted statement that good poetry is “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” without the “reflection” and “deep thought” of the equation acknowledged? What does “deep thought” look like in the Anthropocene?…
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Mike Corrao’s Notes on the Authorial Flux of Swerve: A Novel of Divergence by Vincent James, McCormick Templeman, & Rowland Saifi
We are operating within a set of obfuscated constraints—ones which we can detect, and to an extent identify, but not fully understand. There are dice rolls, geographical mapping/organization, references to other texts, and large-scale tethering to their themes/narratives/motifs. But the practical ways that these tools are used is done so out of our view. Behind…
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“Angel Gone Rogue”: Silverfish, a Clash Books novella by Rone Shavers, reviewed by Moazzam Sheikh
I once translated a highly symbolic story by one of the finest modern Urdu writers Intizar Husain, “A Senseless Upheaval,” where the central character is a bygone era, excavated recently. Proof after proof, we come to understand how social and religious intolerance ushered that era’s gradual declensions and final eclipse. Silverfish’s last chapter, the epilogue,…
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The Age of Discovery, the ninth poetry collection by Alan Michael Parker, reviewed by David Epstein (Tupelo Press)
Pick up a biography, and one is drawn first to thumb through the sheaf of photographs lodged centrally in the book. With a volume of poetry, it’s the notes to the poems, should they exist. The Age of Discovery has notes for nineteen of its forty-five offerings. They are snapshots of Alan Michael Parker’s breadth…
Heavy Feather Review 