Category: Reviews & Criticism

“The Echo Lasts and Lasts”: Loss and Renewal in Donna Vorreyer’s To Everything There Is, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

To Everything There Is, the title of Donna Vorreyer’s new book of poetry, immediately brings to mind the bible verse from Ecclesiastes and the Pete Seeger song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Everything has its season we’re told, and we know this to be true. A time for everything under heaven. What it doesn’t suggest, however, is…
“The Literature of Doom-scrolling”: Gabriel Blackwell’s Correction, a review by Gillian Perry

Reaching the end of this collection, or novel, or account, or whatever this book is to be categorized as, Blackwell acknowledges, “And then of course there is the internet.” Rescue Press’s 2019 Open Prose Selection, Correction does more than just acknowledge the internet—it displays the multifaceted way in which the internet has changed our thinking.…
“The Parts We Play”: Jesi Buell Reviews Theatrix, poetry plays by Terese Svoboda (Anhinga Press)

chance but a chainof electrons vibrating[almostendlessly] only error shitting life I watched Matthew Holness’ Possum right before I picked up this book. That may be why I felt the puppet on the cover of Terese Svoboda’s Theatrix: Poetry Plays held such a sense of foreboding. Both puppets have that same disturbing anthropomorphic face that is…
“In the Tearing Wind”: A Conversation with Edward Foster’s A Looking-Glass for Traytors by Peter Valente

Edward Foster, in his new book of poems A Looking-Glass for Traytors, explores the nature of desire and memory, risking the articulation of what cannot be said, even to the very end, despite chaos, pain, or the oncoming night. So that ecstasy or understanding might be possible: “maintain a quiet surface, and sublimity within is…
Esteban Rodríguez on The Tenant of Fire, an award-winning University of Pittsburgh Press Press poetry collection by Ryan Black

The writer Jay McInerney once said that every generation needed a Manhattan novel, one that captured the culture and sentiment of the time. While his novel Bright Lights, Big City was quite innovative with the use of the second person, as well as with its insight into the publishing industry and New York’s vibrant night…
Book Review by Shannon Nakai: “Life, Language, and the [Im]permanence of Being in Dora Malech’s Flourish“

In her fourth collection of poetry, Dora Malech unveils the miracles and complications of being in her incisive linguistic and imagistic exploration of her everyday surroundings. Flourish is presented in four sections, each epigraphed by a poem that features the titular word, and each that offers a honed glimpse of dormant power that lies in…
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…
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…
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…