Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Lost in The Garden (Director’s Cut) by Louis Armand, an 11:11 Press novel reissue, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker
Might we partake in hashish and focus a high and light mind on this text that rolls unencumbered of final punctuation for 156 pages we would be as magically transported as if reading while sober: The Garden by Louis Armand is that good. Circling back (as the narrative itself does), it is still important to…
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Horsepower, a University of Pittsburgh Press poetry collection by Joy Priest, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez
Every state carries with it certain perceptions that often gloss over the nuances of what it has to offer. Coming from Texas, the stereotypes range anywhere from wearing boots, riding horses, to the expectation that everything must be larger. Kentucky undoubtedly has its share of generalizations, but when you encounter a poet like Joy Priest,…
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Field Light, Owen Lewis’ epic proem from Dos Madres, reviewed by Colin Harrington
Field Light, by Owen Lewis, is a richly captivating collection of prose and poetry that is inspired by the aura of a creative, humanistic, and well-storied past of literature, sociology, psychoanalysis, music, and culture that defines the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The poetry plays out in an intense narrative reverberating from the quiet isolation of…
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boysgirls, Katie Farris’ hybrid prose text from Tupelo Press, reviewed by Cheryl Weaver-Amenta
For such a small book, boysgirls by Katie Farris is intimidating. It dares us into a world of multiplicities bookended in desire, featuring creations that shift with such frequency as to destabilize any bodily manifestations one thinks have become tangible. Language is a means to create and destroy, and Farris challenges her readers in an…
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“Two Wanderers in America”: Katie Nolan’s memoir Confessions of a Hobo’s Daughter, reviewed by Dave Karp
Confessions of a Hobo’s Daughter, a strikingly singular dual memoir about a retired philosophy professor and her Depression-era, rail-riding hobo father, begins with a secret, one that darkens the father’s future life and that overshadows his daughter’s life as well. That secret drives the dual narrative. There is the father, Bud, narrating his impoverished hobo…
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“Welcome to the California Club”: Two Californias, a C&R Press short story collection by Robert Glick, reviewed by Feliz Moreno
There are nuggets of gold sprinkled throughout Robert Glick’s debut story collection Two Californias. The characters in these stories traverse the length of California’s North-South stretch of landscape in a way that feels both intimate and transitory: teenagers working in a pharmacy in the San Gabriel Valley, a Cal graduate student traveling to Topanga Hills…
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“Bringing the Heart of Things to Eye Level”: Louis Elliott on Eye Level, a poetry collection by Jenny Xie (Graywolf Press)
Philosophical, simple, balanced. Such is Eye Level, Jenny Xie’s full-length debut, a collection that returns wisdom from a place seemingly far away and places it for us in full legibility at eye level. Xie practices brevity and clarity, an ability to make deep solitude, or suffering, noble. The poems follow a traveler, a la backpacker,…
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Will Stanier Reviews Exclusions, a Tupelo Press poetry collection by Noah Falck
I suppose any discussion of Noah Falck’s most recent book, Exclusions, should begin with the topic of its title, and the premise this title delivers to the poems within. For Exclusions is certainly what one might call a concept book or a poetry cycle: a collection of fifty or so poems that follow a common…
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Moazzam Sheikh Review: The Shaman of Turtle Valley, a Braddock Avenue Books novel by Clifford Garstang
There’s been a lot of talk, at least since Trump’s victory, about the poor Whites left to rust and rot due to our neoliberal economic policies pursued by the two political parties. We often get stuck with an image of illiterate redneck pockets unable to cope with the evolving nature of modernity and corporate greed.…
Heavy Feather Review 