Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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.…
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…