Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Kara Dorris Reviews Adam Crittenden’s Poetry Collection Blood Eagle (Gold Wake Press)

In her poem “Spring,” Mary Oliver writes, “there is only one question: how to love this world.” And, at first glance, Adam Crittenden’s poetry collection, Blood Eagle, doesn’t seem to have an answer; yet, by dissembling illusions, by using irony and precision to cut away the dead flesh of our delusions, these poems take the…
Micah Zevin Review of Jack Foley’s When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Narrative lyric traditions like the Irish ballads and folksongs traverse all cultures and languages and peoples, often engaging subjects like mortality, a life lived and reflected upon or death and the afterlife to come. Echoing Walt Whitman, Jack Foley uses song as a tool and a teacher in When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs, for both…
“Wish Me Poetry”: Alexis Quinlan on Sarah Sarai’s poetry collection That Strapless Bra in Heaven

It’s the winter of 2020. Despite a life swimming in poetry—despite poems in morning email and poems in backpacks all day, despite poems on “devices,” poems for students, poems at night—I sometimes wonder, What is poetry good for? This is hardly a terrible question. Poetry is like god: if she exists, she can deal with…
Yelena Moskovich’s Two Dollar Radio novel Virtuoso, reviewed by Hayley Neiling

Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso weaves together the stories of several women. Zorka and Jana grow up together in Prague under the oppression of Soviet communism. Struggling to find their identities and sexuality amidst the chaos and hardship of their everyday lives, eventually they go their separate ways, but not without leaving lasting impacts on one another.…