Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Chthonic Poetics”: Mike Corrao on Choi Seungja’s Action Books poetry collection Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me

In her new book, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, Choi Seungja (translated by Won-Chung Kim & Cathy Park Hong) expresses a poetry of the isolated and overgrown—orated alone in a small house in the wilderness, staring out at the horizon of a post-climate apocalypse. The poems of this new collection fester. Often depicting images…
Peter Valente Review: Memory, a Siglio Press book by Bernadette Mayer

1. Bernadette Mayer’s Memory contains around 1100 photographs, along with 31 poetic journal entries. Each day for the month of July 1971, Mayer would take photographs, using up a roll of film, and write in her journal: “take pictures for a week, say, then put them away don’t even show them around for a year…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
“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…
“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…
“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,…