Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“Aviatrix Tricks”: Thomas E. Simmons on C.L. Nehmer’s Finishing Line Press poetry collection The Alchemy of Planes
C.L. Nehmer’s debut book, The Alchemy of Planes, reflects on Amelia Earhart. It intercuts a birth-to-end biography with a handful of imagined—but for the most part historical—scenes. Those historical scenes include Earhart’s service in World War I, her love of flying, her marriage, and her celebrity. Earhart’s celebrity was well-earned. She was—to cite just one…
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Postal, a Boss Fight Books nonfiction title by Brock Wilbur & Nathan Rabin, reviewed by Andrew Rihn
Postal by Brock Wilbur & Nathan Rabin is intelligent, compelling, and infinitely more lighthearted than the video game it chronicles. As a piece of nonfiction, Wilbur & Rabin combine personal anecdote, interviews, and cultural criticism with a deep dive into the history and backstory of the 1997 game Postal. Although a relative non-gamer myself, I…
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The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, a new sci-fi novel by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell (Spaceboy Books)
Genre tropes are rarely taken seriously by ivory tower literati, which is to their detriment given the wonderful writing that flows from a variety of pens. Through this work, we come to understand present predicaments and make sense of arbitrary situations, much like myths did for our ancestors. In Jordan A. Rothacker’s latest offering, The…
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The Drover’s Wife, an Australian high-country play by Leah Purcell, reviewed by Kiran Bhat (Currency Press)
Few works of fiction are as inspiring to a country’s national history and formation as “The Drover’s Wife” by Henry Lawson. “The Drover’s Wife” is a late nineteenth century story about a woman living without her husband, with her four children, as a snake comes along and threatens her life. It is a story about…
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Yet to Come, a new novel by Cris Mazza, reviewed by Jane Rosenberg LaForge (BlazeVOX Books)
The line between art and life, or perhaps better stated, fiction and fictionalizing, is one Cris Mazza has repeatedly tested in recent years, in daring and illuminating ways. Her 2014 novel of the rippling effects of sex abuse, Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls, was published as a companion to her 2013 meta-memoir, Something…
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Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, a new collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, reviewed by Jesi Buell (Graywolf Press)
I first became aware of Mexican author Julián Herbert when Graywolf published Christina MacSweeney’s translation of his novel Tomb Songs in 2018. Having really enjoyed that work, I was excited for the opportunity to review this trio’s most recent project, Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino. And, I have to admit, after spending…
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Weird Pig, a novel by Robert Long Foreman, reviewed by Christina Ghent
Have you ever met pig that is able to talk? How about one that is able to walk upright on two legs? Or how about a pig who is unable to control his urges to steal cars, drink beer, and commit murder? Weird Pig is able to do all of that and more. In fact,…
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“Chthonic Poetics”: Mike Corrao on Choi Seungja’s Action Books poetry collection Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me
In her new book, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, Choi Seungja (translated by Won-Chung Kim & Cathy Park Hong) expresses a poetry of the isolated and overgrown—orated alone in a small house in the wilderness, staring out at the horizon of a post-climate apocalypse. The poems of this new collection fester. Often depicting images…
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Peter Valente Review: Memory, a Siglio Press book by Bernadette Mayer
1. Bernadette Mayer’s Memory contains around 1100 photographs, along with 31 poetic journal entries. Each day for the month of July 1971, Mayer would take photographs, using up a roll of film, and write in her journal: “take pictures for a week, say, then put them away don’t even show them around for a year…
Heavy Feather Review 