Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Little Hollywood, a collection of scripts and paper doll actors by Jinnwoo, reviewed by Marcus Pactor

Jinnwoo’s Little Hollywood is an inventive, fun, and depressing collection of stories. Each short piece—none is longer than four pages—is written in the form of a script. The use of this form (which I can only remember seeing carried through an entire book one other time, in Darius James’s Negrophobia) distinguishes his stories from other…
Tyler Dempsey Devours Jules Archer’s Little Feasts, a flash fiction collection from Thirty West Publishing House

Children are marched, or forced to crawl, over dead leaves and prairie dog holes, whispering lies to the pecan tree Daddy promised one day to fell. Strip of bark—revealing words etched and glowing underneath. WE are the Lie Tree. Little Feasts is Jules Archer stripping our bark. This debut smorgasbord of stories feels connected, though…
Bianca Cockrell on E. Briskin’s poetry hybrid collection Orange (Entre Rios Books)

Sitting at a coffee shop, I flipped through E. Briskin’s linked collection Orange. Its speaker, funny and cryptic and sad, sits also frequently at a coffee shop, remembering their dog, mourning the loss of their dog, and pondering the metaphysics of such a loss. The Seattle-based author’s debut collection is comprised of hundreds of short…
“Notes on Archi-text-ure”: Mike Corrao Reviews Candice Wuehle’s second poetry collection Death Industrial Complex from Action Books

Candice Wuehle’s newest book, Death Industrial Complex, is a collection of ekphrastic poems made in conversation with the works of Francesca Woodman. Before reading the book, I had not known this. I was unfamiliar with the artist and her work. But throughout the course of my reading it always felt as if there was something…