Category: Reviews & Criticism

“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,…
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…