Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Normal as a Coke and a Candy Bar”: Dave Karp Apprises the Insistently Angry Voices of Joel Felix’s Poetry Collection Concealed Nations

Male anxiety, embarrassment, and rage; pervasive fear of the world around you and insistence on controlling it; naked cynicism and impotently blinkered idealism, with all the economic, political and technological pressures that activate them—Concealed Nations, a new book of poetry by Joel Felix, brings all these to life and suggests how they horribly, oppressively cohere.…
“Post-digital Kenosis”: On Jake Reber’s ambient body horror ZER000 EXCESS (11:11 Press)

I. What would happen if you ran all our systems of signification through a large hadron collider? The result might be something like Jake Reber’s ZER000 EXCESS—the result would frighten us. What follows is our attempt to come to grips with this work, one which denies us the refuge of conventional meaning structures … II.…
Tom Griffen Responds to Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos, a Clash Books poetry title

Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos is poetic investigative reportage, if there is such a thing. It’s a genre-less amass of official US documents, such as the Customs and Border Protection’s Use of Force Policy, the US Patent paperwork on Hand-Held Stun Guns for Incapacitating a Human Target, the Department of State’s Celebrate! Holidays in the U.S.A.,…
Magnolia Canopy Otherworld, Erin Carlyle’s debut poetry collection, reviewed by Nicholas Rys (Driftwood Press)

Carlyle’s full-length poetry collection is as full and rich of naturalistic and surreal imagery as its title suggests. The book is a haunting exploration and a portrait of what it means to grow up as a girl and woman in the forgotten South. Here, characters shuffle in and out of drug clinics, go down to…
How It Looks Away from Here, a Ravenna Press poetry collection by Joan Fiset, reviewed by Robert Dunsdon

A girl, around eight or nine years old perhaps, and tightly wrapped up against the cold, stands motionless on a small trampoline. She got here having walked on duckboards across an uneven and muddy yard from what looks like a shabby barn. Who she is and what she represents, if anything, is anyone’s guess; she…
Esteban Rodríguez on Alen Hamza’s CSU Poetry Center debut collection Twice There Was a Country

Winner of the 2019 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition, Alen Hamza’s Twice There Was A Country is a collection that reminds us that regardless of the past or the circumstances we find currently ourselves in, it’s never too late to reconnect with who we are and where we came from. While Hamza’s…
“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…
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…
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…