Category: Reviews & Criticism

Book Review: Anthony Borruso Reads Chris Campanioni’s Hybrid Text north by north/west

Despite its directional title, Chris Campanioni’s hybrid text north by north/west: (an attention to frequency) is a virtuosic linguistic collage that, more often than not, indulges in indirection and subversion. Taking inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, who was known for his narrative deception and generic subterfuge (even going so far as to kill off his leading…
Fiction Review: Asha Dore Reads Em J Parsley’s Novella You, from Below

In Em J Parsley’s You, from Below, the speaker climbs an Appalachian mountain to deliver an envelope after their holler town falls apart. The speaker is the only survivor. Along the way, they meet folks and gather their stories of “rapture and decay.” This slim novella punches lyrically through landslides and loss, punctuated by often…
Fiction Review: Tara Van De Mark Reads Diana Oropeza’s Debut Collection An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance by Diana Oropeza arrived by mail, slipped out of the envelope, through my hands, and onto the hallway floor. The size of a passport, it landed next to a banana peel and a pile of junk mail and I worried that this treasure would, like the subject it ponders, disappear. Instead, it…
New Music Essay: “How I Got into Free Improvisation” by Peter Valente

I remember as a teenager living in Fairview, NJ, and going down to the corner store and finding a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s Art of the Improvisors. I grew up listening to classical music and opera and I knew there was something about the sound of free jazz that I liked but it would be…
Fiction Review: Andrew Fort Reads Dustin M. Hoffman’s Collection Such a Good Man

Whose America is it? The subject of Dustin M. Hoffman’s collection Such a Good Man is, by sheer percentage, masculinity in Middle America. Represented here are good fathers, bad fathers, and in-between fathers. There are husbands who are trying hard and husbands who aren’t trying very much at all. There are laborers, house painters, framers,…
Book Review: Beau Farris Enters the Orbit of Monica Ong’s Visual Poetry Collection Planetaria

In Monica Ong’s newest book of visual poetry, Planetaria, she doesn’t just write poems, she constructs systems. Drawing from astronomical charts, family photographs, speculative science, and myth, Ong builds a constellation of visual devices that call us into orbit. Her poems are not static pages but interactive mechanisms; volvelles, planispheres, and family photographs shape the…
Fiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Rebecca Fishow’s Collection How to Love a Black Hole

Something is always wrong with our bodies, at least a little. Sometimes you have an ear growing out of your back. Sometimes your upper skull is removed and fastened over your face. Rebecca Fishow, author of How to Love a Black Hole, is closely attuned to these strange mutations. The collection of fabulist flash fiction…
Nonfiction Review: William Lessard Reads Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Critical Writings A Tradition of Rupture

A Tradition of Rupture collects the critical writings of an Argentine poet (1936-1972) whose life and work have come to the attention of English-speaking readers in the past decade. Not unlike the Roberto Bolaño craze of the aughts, new translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry have appeared almost every year, selling well among anglophones eager for…
“Fingers at the Tip of My Words”: Alyssa Quinn on Sulaiman Addonia’s Novel The Seers

What’s the power of a paragraph? What does a paragraph do to the sentences it binds? A paragraph break, surely, is always ideological—it carries a meta-narrative about what is connected, what is disconnected. It sifts space and time into discrete, navigable units, seeding the text with white spaces like driftwood which we might grasp amid…