Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…