Category: Reviews & Criticism

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?…
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…