Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
“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.,…