Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Animal Children, Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s surreal microfiction collection from Nomadic Press, reviewed by Tyler Dempsey

Note I Feverishly Add 12 Hours Before the Speech In front of Death and everyone, I bury the lede in the mirror: “What sort of book is this? Is it poetry? Fiction? Something else? So a good jumping off point might be to examine the idea of genre, starting with asking the class how they…
“Graphical Variations”: My Red Heaven by Lance Olsen, an historical experimental novel from Dzanc Books, reviewed by Daniel Green

In a career that now includes 14 novels and four collections of short fiction (as well as seven works of nonfiction), Lance Olsen has produced an admirable variety of experimental fictions, no one of which seems merely a repetition of any of the others. There are identifiable tendencies and gestures in his work, to be…
The Fabulous Dead, Andriana Minou’s un-historical flash fictions from KERNPUNKT Press, reviewed by Christina Ghent

The iconic and celebrated historical composers, astronauts, actresses, philosophers, and authors among a host of others are brought back to life within Andriana Minou’s short story collection, The Fabulous Dead. Their lives are deconstructed in an often humorous manner that forces us to consider the possibilities that history might not have gotten it exactly right.…
Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek, a very real story collection from Soft Skull Press, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

This slim collection of compact stories left me dumbfounded that we’re given the agency to run our own lives when it’s clear there are myriad ways we’re screwing them up. Disconnection, isolation, distraction, and desire are just a few of the ploys we dumb humans engage to safeguard against making connections that are too true,…
The Ambrose and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art, Matthew Kirkpatrick’s haunted exhibition catalog from Acre Books, reviewed by Joe Sacksteder

After spending a couple decades pretty bored with art museums, I’ve fallen in love with these spaces in the last couple years. I think the change occurred because my comprehensive exams at the University of Utah were focused on aesthetic theory and interdisciplinarity, and so I emerged from those intensive studies with a broadened view…