Category: Reviews & Criticism

Story, Jennifer Firestone’s fifth book of poetry from Ugly Duckling Presse, reviewed by Dave Karp

One regular feature of contemporary writing instruction is the dictum that the writer should “tell her story,” bringing new and needed narratives to light and challenging old, entrenched ones explicitly or implicitly. Jennifer Firestone’s Story meets this challenge in a different way. The poem resists not so much dominant narratives as narrative itself; it is…
No Good for Digging, Dustin M. Hoffman’s second story collection from Word West Press, reviewed by Joaquin Macias

In preparation for reviewing, Dustin M. Hoffman’s No Good for Digging, I spent three years taking every class he offered at Winthrop University. So, I have been taking notes on what he considers important enough to teach a fiction student. Naturally, you can’t judge a writer by how well they teach or a teacher by…
Clancy McGilligan’s 2019 Prize-Winning Novella History of an Executioner, reviewed by Erica Chamberlain

Clancy McGilligan’s History of an Executioner details the everyday routine and duties of a small town’s executioner. Set in a dystopian society constantly at risk of violent attack from rebel forces, the executioner performs near-daily executions in the town square and is seen in a negative light by the people because of his profession. After…
Melissa Duclos’s Debut Novel Besotted, reviewed by Genevieve Shuster

Melissa Duclos’s Besotted tells the simultaneously building and unraveling love story of two queer women expats in Shanghai, Sasha and Liz. Their relationship begins with Sasha beefing up Liz’s unimpressive application materials to work in the school where Sasha works; Sasha decides, before the two even meet, that Liz is the means by which she…
Whispers in the Ear of a Dreaming Ape, a horror short story collection by Joshua Chaplinsky, reviewed by Avery Cook

Joshua Chaplinsky has concocted a collection of disturbing stories told through voices we haven’t heard from before: serial killers and their mothers, sex cult evangelists and athiest priests, time traveling daughters and undead fathers. Characters are trapped in physical boxes and mental chaoses, unable to escape with their bodies and their lives intact. Written like…
Undoll, a YesYes Books National Poetry Series debut collection by Tanya Grae, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

After finishing a book, it’s not uncommon for readers to express how they were left wanting more, wishing, for example, that an author would have expanded on a certain section or added to the themes explored. The often quoted saying by Paul Valéry is that a poem is never complete, but merely abandoned, and the…
Layla Saleeby on Soft Fruit in the Sun, Oliver Zarandi’s debut story collection from Hexus Press

Despite its focus on surreal body horror and strange characters who lick alleyway walls or get eaten by their children, Oliver Zarandi’s short story collection Soft Fruit in the Sun surpasses the limitations of shock value, instead developing over time a complex picture of paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, and emotional detachment from the world. Soft…
Rayanna Pinnock on Like Wings, Your Hands, Elizabeth Earley’s sophomore novel

The relationship between any mother and her son is a complicated one to build and define. At its surface, Elizabeth Earley’s novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, seemingly aims to simply do just that—to explore the complicated lives of a mother and her son. As soon as the novel beings, the reader experiences the realization that…
Furies: Thus Spoke, O’Brian Gunn’s first novel in a series, reviewed by Ann Davis-Rowe

2019 brought no shortage of onscreen not-so-superheroes, from Amazon Prime’s televised interpretation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic The Boys to Thanos just wanting to save the Marvel Comic Universe in Avengers: Endgame. Into this fray, O’Brian Gunn brings us the Alpha-Omegas—human-types with previously dormant superhuman genes that begin to unexpectedly spring into action.…