Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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…
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…
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…
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?…