Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Stephen D. Gutierrez’s Novel Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand

Stephen D. Gutierrez—Steve—is trying to write a short story. He’ll get around to changing the characters’ names to disguise his real-life self and his real-life friends and loved ones. In brackets he notes [deal with name later]. He’s so excited by the prospect of writing his story that he sends his first drafts to Harper’s…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Dan Tremaglio’s Lyric Noir The Only Wolf Is Time

Dan Tremaglio’s The Only Wolf Is Time is a novel told through fragments. These fragments initially seem like discrete objects, pulled in from all sorts of sources—some of these scraps are graffiti tags, some are photographs of sculpture, some are dictionary definitions or screenplay dialogue. There’s a little of everything. But the beauty of Tremaglio’s…
Poetry Review: Candice Louisa Daquin Reads Courtney LeBlanc’s New Collection Her Dark Everything

Deeply personal threads shine through this collection, concerning the deaths of LeBlanc’s father and best friend—yet these narratives are not linear, but always wrapped in further messages, not strictly elegiac, but more a passing through of notes, as we see in music. Sometimes we are unable to assess the poem’s stakes, but the structure brings…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Stefan O. Rak’s Paranoic Novel New Roses

Paranoia is a tricky beast to capture. I think we can all recognize and relate to it from the outside easily enough, whether in the wild-eyed monologuing of Macbeth and Raskolnikov or the slow-burn panic of classic alienation thrillers like The Conversation and The Parallax View, or the countless ongoing explorations of our evolving surveillance…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s Debut Novel Then Then Then

Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s debut novel, Then Then Then, is told in fragmentary manner. Fragmentary is not quite the right word—it’s hard to describe the pieces, the moments that make up Then Then Then as fragments, because they’re something different. They are layers. DeMer has attempted to create a novel in the form of a mixed-media…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jeff Alessandrelli’s Novel about Sex & Shyness & Society And Yet

And Yet is a written record of a nameless narrator’s effort to make sense of his romantic life. He’s a young adult, busy developing a sense of self, and he sees the way his relationships affect that development. He sees that romantic relationships can foster his selfhood, and also that they can warp it. So…
“A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the Harlem Renaissance”: John Schertzer Reads Jon Woodson’s Novel The Staircase Shuffle

Jon Woodson, professor emeritus of Howard University, most notably author of To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, has of late been self-publishing both his recent scholarship as well as a few novels, collections of poetry, and translations of African writers of merit. I’m a fan of all categories of his…
Poetry Review: Sarah Giragosian Reads Jackie Craven’s Award-Winning Collection Whish

During the pandemic, it was commonplace to hear people talk about how slippery time is. The lockdown dramatized the strange and sinuous qualities of time, the ways that time can stall and slip off the surface of consciousness all at once. These properties of time are difficult to capture, although many poets have tried. Whish…
Poetry Review: Dan Hodgson Reads Diego Báez’s Debut Collection Yaguareté White

By the middle of her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip has worked “English” from a “mother tongue” to a “father tongue” to “a foreign anguish” by rubbing it against what “mother tongues” and “father tongues” mean in relief of slavery-era edicts bent on the “removal of tongue[s].”…