Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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,…
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…
“What We Were Given”: Darren C. Demaree on Count Four., a University of Tampa Press poetry collection by Keith Kopka

I grew up in a house with a shortage of oxygen. One person would take deep and disquieting breaths while the rest of us relied on the air tucked underneath our clenched jaws to make it from room to room. It’s been a long time since I experienced that level of intensity from familial reckonings,…
Hiding in a Thimble, a HVTN Press debut poetry collection by Roseanna Alice Boswell, reviewed by Erin Carlyle

Roseanna Alice Boswell’s debut collection of poetry, Hiding in a Thimble, imagines power in the most tender of places: Bunny needs you to get hipto her hop, her sexual symbolstatus—fertility goddessfur princess swoon. She is cotton-tailed and pheromoned. With a sharp, rose-colored knife, her poems artfully tear apart the meaning of the word saccharine. What is…
Selling the Farm, a C&R Press lyric memoir by Debra Di Blasi, reviewed by Aimee Parkison

Selling the Farm, winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, defies traditional notions of genre. This lyrical memoir is a biography of a family farm veiling the autobiography of a writer using craft to locate her family in a place lost to time. The author is hidden in the landscape of her childhood. In the setting…
Peter Valente on Larry Fagin’s Peaches & Gravy: Selected Poems 1966-2016, edited by Miles Champion (Cuneiform)

In free improvisation, one requires quick responses to shifting musical realities. Instinctive unity of mind, hand, mouth is required: out with the ego. You need to be quick, “on the fly,” then it’s gone. It’s about aiming for the Total Sound, heard in part. When it works: success of the ultimate dares. In this way,…
Island of the Innocent, Diane Glancy’s Turtle Point Press poetry-hybrid consideration of the Book of Job, reviewed by Dan Alter

Diane Glancy’s new collection of poems and hybrid writing Island of the Innocent is a grand work of what my tradition calls midrash (elaborating on, weaving new stories into, the canonical texts) on the Book of Job. An acclaimed writer of Cherokee descent, Glancy brings the ancient text, via a Christian, King James English, into…
“Notes on a Procedural Cityscape”: Joshua Rothes’ We Later Cities, an Inside the Castle Castlefreak novel, reviewed by Mike Corrao

Joshua Rothes becomes the second victim of Inside the Castle’s Castle Freak Remote Residency for Generative Digital Composition—which requires the afflicted writer to create a 100,000 word manuscript in five days using bots/Twine-builds/neural networks/etc. Whatever means necessary. The first book to come out of this was Mike Kleine’s Lonely Men Club, which utilized the probability…