Category: Reviews & Criticism

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner Kate Wisel’s debut story collection, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is, on one level, author Kate Wisel’s homage to the friendship of women. It also looks at our preconceived ideas of youth, women, poverty, and choice. Serena, Frankie, Natalya, and Raffa live in working-class Boston. They navigate through the pain in their lives by smoking, drinking, and driving around…
Essays One, the first nonfiction essay collection by fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis, reviewed by Marcus Pactor

Lydia Davis requires little introduction. She is well known for her innovative short fiction, her lone novel, and her many translations. But Davis has also published a number of essays over the past few decades and, at long last, has begun to compile them in two volumes. Essays Two will be published in the near…
Callista Buchen’s debut prose poetry collection Look Look Look, reviewed by Christen Kauffman

Look at the mother—the way her body is a house, a machine, a haven, a raw collection of love and devastation in the wake of her children’s entrance into the world. Look at how her body becomes foreign, becomes open wound, becomes blood memory, is reborn at the bottom of the sea. Look at how…
Because What Else Could I Do, the tenth poetry collection by Pitt Poetry Series Author Martha Collins, reviewed by Sarah Sarai

Visually delicate and emotionally substantial, the fifty-five poems in Martha Collins’ tenth collection, Because What Else Could I Do, interrogate the expectation inherent in connection, here, the poet’s with her husband, whose death set up a barrier to comprehension (“as if the fact were a mass of lead”). There is a poetic narrative of discovery…
Relief by Execution, a visit to Mauthausen by Gint Aras, reviewed by Emily Webber

Prompted by a conversation with a stranger, Gint Aras decides to travel to Mauthausen, the site of a Holocaust concentration camp. In Relief by Execution, Aras details this journey and his family history, showing the impact of racism, violence, war, and silence on an individual and throughout generations. He explores how much are we our…
Heed the Hollow, a Graywolf Press debut poetry collection by Malcolm Tariq, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

There is something about the body that makes it an endless source for the written word. Whether exploring the body’s physical aspects, its changing implications in a changing society, or the fact that it’s seen by many (particularly in a religious context) as a flawed vessel we must navigate in in order to reach a…
Famine, an Alien Buddha Press novella by Joshua Rodriguez, reviewed by Joaquin Macias

In Famine (Get the hell outta here while you still can) by Joshua Rodriguez, the narrator begins at what must be his lowest point, alcoholic and estranged from his wife and children, but then his brother comes to him with the news that their father had died. They set off together and while the narrator…
This Particular Happiness, a Forest Avenue Press memoir by Jackie Shannon Hollis, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

Jackie Shannon Hollis’s debut book, a memoir, braids together a variety of stories and timelines to tell a holistic tale about its author’s choice not to have children. It would have been easy to write this book as a polemic; choosing not to have children is an extremely contentious topic. However, Hollis did not come…
Xerox Over Manhattan, an Apocalypse Party novel by Shane Jesse Christmass, reviewed by Bryce Jones

Narrative buttons smashed. Glitching the reader through three frames of reality. External/internal/media. Each sentence tersely punctuated. The reader written into demolishing pauses. No paragraphs. Periods acting like doormen, asleep on the job, letting in strangers. A flimsy caesura. Loose nails pierce the page-walls. Purported as breath-hangings. Wrinkled breath bleating on the floor of your chest:…