Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Fablesque, a Tupelo Press poetry-hybrid collection by Anna Maria Hong, reviewed by David Epstein

Let’s assume the superlatives are sprinkled all throughout. Fablesque is a poetically expansive volume, a house in three wings, with each wing containing, if not multitudes, then dozens of rooms. The rooms themselves are in every architecture, from personal archeology—where Anna Maria Hong offers her family history in thin threads of heredity: impetuous ancestry plus…
Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach Monches Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets (Radioactive Cloud)

My immediate connection to Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets was through the band Ceremony. In their first single (“Sick”) from their 2010 album Ronhert Park, the singer litanizes on things he is sick of, many of the complaints directed at hardcore itself. At the time of Ronhert Park’s release, the band were hardcore darlings, and the…
“Inside Endless Epidemics in America” – Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, a Tupelo Press anthology edited by Kristina Marie Darling & Jeffrey Levine, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

As of this writing, over 420,000 Americans have died from Coronavirus, to say nothing of the suffering of millions of others. “They died breathing the country that failed them. They died without the hands that should have held them at the last breath. They died in nobody’s arms,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths tells us, a truth…
In the Awakening Season, a Tupelo Press / Leapfolio poetry collection by Matthew Mumber, reviewed by David Epstein

“If medicine were my spouse,” Matthew Mumber posits, “I would ask politely / if we could have a long-overdue chat.” It’s possible to understand many of these poems as a transcript of such conversation. Mumber, an oncologist, has given us a three-part book of thirty-eight poems in some sixty pages. The strengths of this collection…
Ancestry, a short story collection by Eileen O’Leary, reviewed by Julia Breitkreutz

In her short story collection Ancestry, Eileen O’Leary invites us into the lives of characters who are searching for a sense of belonging in a world which she reveals to be often void of authentic human connection. We witness the futile attempts of an over-eager college student in “Adam,” as he desperately tries to form…
The Trouble with Language, a TRNSFR Books debut fiction collection by Rebecca Fishow, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Rawness, strangeness, and unpredictability have been nearly universal facets of daily life in 2020, and, in that sense, Rebecca Fishow’s debut collection, The Trouble with Language, couldn’t have come at a better time. Rife with explorations of self-alienation, desire for purpose, disconnects, and detachments, the thirty pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction…