Category: Reviews & Criticism

Andrew Farkas on L.M. Rainer’s Pelekinesis essay collection How to Behave

There’s an exchange at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” that encapsulates L.M. Rainer’s style in her collection of essays, How to Behave: Mrs. Hopewell: He was so simple, but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple. Mrs. Freeman: Some can’t be that simple. I know…
“From Extract to Artifact”: Review of Max Brett’s PANK Books poetry collection Nor Do These by Juliana Converse

To introduce his first book, Max Brett describes the collaborative exercise that prompted the poems in Nor Do These. He hints at a contentious and ill-fated set of relationships that ultimately ended the collaboration. But the pieces themselves are far from confessional. In fact, the observing voice in these poems is often detached, as though…
Rift Zone, a Red Hen Press poetry collection by Tess Taylor, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Given the way history is inadequately taught throughout schools across the country, it’s safe to assume that it would be a challenge for anyone to recount at least a half-detailed history of their hometown. For 18 years, I never knew that Harlon Block Park in my hometown of Weslaco, Texas, was named after one of…
A History of My Brief Body, essays by Billy-Ray Belcourt, reviewed by Christina Ghent

History has traditionally been written by those who have the privilege to write it. Archives are created and maintained by those same people in power who can write their own narrative and the narrative for those they have conquered. Monarchies seeking to expand their power colonized places in the name of the throne and declared…
“On Slipping Code”: Stephanie Strickland’s new and selected poems How the Universe Is Made, reviewed by Alexis Quinlan

Like many, I come to Stephanie Strickland via the digital. In the winter of 2009, she brought her laptop to the Poetry Project’s lectern. A video loop of waves crashing soon appeared on the projector screen. At the top of each swell, in dainty, spidery cursive font, a fragment of her poem “slippingglimpse” pitched forward…
Esteban Rodríguez on Arrows, Dan Beachy-Quick’s seventh poetry collection (Tupelo Press)

At its core, poetry seeks to examine the relationship between things, and although there are many ways in which poets achieve this, no one quite does it as thoughtfully as Dan Beachy-Quick. The author of six previous poetry collections, Beachy-Quick’s newest book Arrows explores love, faith, philosophy, the constraints and usefulness of language, and the…
Tyler Dempsey Fishes Lake of Urine, the debut novel by Guillermo Stitch

Two beginner tricks of competitive memory are 1) create a memory palace and 2) occupy it. The more absurd, obscene, lascivious, and odorous the occupants—the better. Take, for example, Abraham Lincoln masturbating your mom in a childhood bathtub as a raven consumes a severed breast on his top hat. Exhibit B: Max Headroom juggling a…
Laura Eppinger Responds to Instances of Head-Switching, a short story collection by Teresa Milbrodt

The short stories in Instances of Head-Switching by Teresa Milbrodt report back from other worlds in sharp prose that is evocative but never flowery. Milbrodt fuses fairytale or mythological elements with the mundanities of adulthood, but there’s a lot more going on in every story. Strange settings are the background for characters to contend with…
“Necessary Reading for Troubled Times”: K, a novel by SFWP Author Ted O’Connell, reviewed by Amy Stonestrom

Ted O’Connell’s debut novel introduces us to Francis Kauffman, an American professor who finds himself in a Chinese prison cell with six inmates, one of which he and the others are ordered to execute. K weaves back and forth between Kauffman’s grim existence in Kun Chong Prison and his former life as a free man in…