Category: Reviews & Criticism

Bad Poet, 100 bad poems by Brian Alan Ellis, reviewed by Charlene Elsby

Spread out over two pages at the start of Bad Poet is the sentence, “I write bad poetry and I don’t care.” So if you believe Brian Alan Ellis, you might as well put down the book right then, because it’s bad and you don’t have time for that. But the poems aren’t bad. They’re…
All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest poetry collection, reviewed by Juliana Converse

As I read Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest collection of poems, the world is in quarantine as we wait out the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, we heard the coronavirus would mostly affect the already vulnerable, the elderly and the immunocompromised. Children were thought to be less at risk, and if you were between the ages…
Tom Griffen’s Response to The Worming of America, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women, a historical novel by Autumn Leaf

Please, do not get comfortable. To worm is to move with difficulty. To worm is to foist one’s way into. To worm is to make a rope smooth by winding lengths of fiber between preexisting strands. To worm is to create momentum through artful and insidious means. To worm is to move as its namesake—in…
GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted, an essay by Dennis James Sweeney, reviewed by Frank J. Crone

“If you don’t believe in ghosts, you don’t believe in your own interstices,” says Dennis James Sweeney in his latest chapbook GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted. Sweeney gifts us a formalistic yet pleasurable read that points out how we don’t have to go far to find the ghost(s) haunting all of us. Providing…
Circus + The Skin, the first novel from Keith McCleary, reviewed by Kelsi Brown

The premise is a deceptively simple one: A man walks in with tattoos that form a pattern he doesn’t understand, and asks me to explain. And I can’t explain. No matter how you got those tattoos. It’s not important anymore. It’s the skin that keeps you safe. Or ignorant, which is close. They will call…
“Nothing Not Nothing in Jeff Alessandrelli’s Poetry Collection Fur Not Light”: A Review by Michael Sikkema

Magic not poetry Ongoingness not epiphany Absurdism not nonsense The 32nd of December not New Year’s Poetry not magic Fur Not Light, Jeff Alessandrelli’s second book with Burnside Review Press, has had me wandering its psychogeography for a week. First off, to be clear, Fur Not Light led me to flip Guy Debord’s idea of…
Hayley Neiling Reviews Jeffrey Condran’s New Story Collection Claire, Wading into the Danube by Night

In Claire, Wading into the Danube by Night, Jeffrey Condran paints vivid portraits of people who are often neither likeable or unlikable. He takes snapshots of their lives and hands them to us in intimate detail. From an actress who steps into the shoes of someone much more successful than she, to a hostess cake…
Two Novels: Howl Revisited and Green Detectives by Mike Corrao, reviewed by Ryan Bollenbach

Mike Corraro’s Two Novels offers a surreal diary-like meditation on the embodied power of art that turns the hunt for inspiration into a corporeal and visceral concern. Howl Revisited, the first of the two sequences, is a fugue-like journey in prose poem snippets depicting the speaker’s relationship with Allen Ginsberg, undead and risen from the…
“Jewel Thieves and Butlers and Cellophane Graves”: J. MacBain-Stephens Reviews Jessie Janeshek’s Poetry Chapbook Channel U

The backcover page of Jessie Janeshek’s recent chapbook, Channel U, excerpts Reddit to define Channel U: “Stands for ‘UHF’ or Ultra High Frequency. With the TV tuned to ‘U’ that would enable a second tuning knob that allowed you to get to the higher channels.” Then there are comments from SomeGuyNamedPaul and IronSloth because of…