Category: Reviews & Criticism

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:…
In the Dream House, a Graywolf Press memoir by Carmen Maria Machado, reviewed by Benjamin Kinney

One of my favorite horror tropes is the house that builds itself. Inhabitants stumble into rooms they know they’ve never visited before. There is nothing overtly menacing about the rooms, at least initially—they have the same walls and ceiling and furniture as the rest of the house. The fear is in being disoriented, as well…
CL Bledsoe Reviews Nathan Leslie’s Ninth Story Collection Hurry Up and Relax

I’m a big fan of Nathan Leslie’s short story collections. Over the years, he’s published nine, as well as a novella collection, an excellent novel, and a poetry collection. His stories are often funny, often poignant, and always try to get at an understanding of how to live in this sometimes unsatisfying but usually surprising…
Kat Solomon on Lindsay Lerman’s Debut Novel I’m From Nowhere

Lindsay Lerman’s debut novel I’m From Nowhere is a slim book that packs a powerful philosophical punch. Claire, somewhere in her thirties, has lost her husband John unexpectedly and the tragedy throws her into a full existential crisis. Meanwhile, two of her husband’s friends, both having expressed romantic interest in Claire, appear at John’s funeral,…
“The Hypothetical Men Behind The Hypothetical Man”: Jesi Buell on a TRNSFR Books collaborative novel-in-stories by Paul Maliszewski & Ryan Weil (?)

In Buddhism, I have heard them refer to this as “monkey mind”—that endless chatter of what we are doing, what we are about, the way it goes, often beyond us, in the background or the foreground, the parade of images, and half-thoughts, noises, thoughts of smells, things that never happened to us, but appearing so.…
The Book of Daniel, the fourth collection from Pitt Poetry Series Author Aaron Smith, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

If someone recommended a book titled The Book of Daniel, you might be inclined to believe that it has, in some shape or form, religious content and themes. Or you might suspect that this book was titled as such in order to be ironic, to subtly poke fun at religion and what it stands for…
“A fact I wore like jewlery”: Dan Alter Reviews Green-Wood, a Nightboat Books poetry collection by Allison Cobb

As far as what we must do in the crisis of humans and our environment, at least this much seems clear: poetry will not be the key field of battle. Nonetheless, some of us, for whom poems are an essential mode of understanding, need to write about poetry about it anyway. And so we’re led…
Noreen Hernandez Reviews The Wagners, a booklength poem by John Colasacco

The Wagners, a poem, tells the stories of different generations of Wagners. Or, that’s what we are told on the back cover. I tried, but couldn’t keep track of the Wagners because the bits do not form a historical family narrative. But it doesn’t matter, because the poem is a journal of the sensations that…