Category: Reviews & Criticism

Chelsea Biondolillo’s essay collection The Skinned Bird, reviewed by Christen Kauffman

Song birds, or oscine Passeriformes, with fixed song repertoires learn to sing in four steps. The steps are studied, in part, because, many linguists believe that these same four steps describe human acquisition. In this essay collection collaged with photographs, migration lists, and ornithological instruction, Chelsea Biondolillo uses experimental form and scientific observation to dig…
Shane Jesse Christmass on Death Valley Superstars, Duke Haney’s occasionally fatal essay collection

For people … like myself … that take morbid delight in the machinery of Hollywood and its end product … movies – then this book is pure candy – a riotous … and virtuous sugar-hit … a thrill ride … of investigative essays somewhat in the vein of Kenneth Anger … or the more Tinsel…
Amazing Things Are Happening Here, short stories by Jacob M. Appel, reviewed by Patrick Parks

In her essay, “Uncanny Singing that Comes from Certain Husks,” Joy Williams observes that a good piece of fiction “startles the reader back into life … It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming.” Jacob M. Appel’s newest book of short stories, Amazing Things Are Happening Here, exemplifies Williams’ description, particularly the way…
Zachary Kocanda on Ryan Werner’s Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, a book of one sentence album reviews

I was introduced to Ryan Werner’s work when I read and reviewed his novella Soft (Passenger Side Books, 2015) a few years ago. The novella is composed of two hundred fifty-eight micro-chapters, some as short as one sentence, so it made sense that for his new book, Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, Werner decided to…
Jonah Davis on GLOSS, Rebecca Hazelton’s new poetry collection

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.William Carlos Williams If the seductive cover, with its sensual cover image split in half, its glamorous pinks and reds, and the title’s undulating cursive font—if these weren’t striking enough, Rebecca Hazelton’s new book of poems, Gloss, begins with the attention-grabbing poem “Group Sex.” What…
Ugly Music, a poetry collection by Diannely Antigua, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music is a lyrical collage that meditates on childhood, trauma, survival, sexual identity, love, loss, and the often complicated journey through womanhood. Antigua’s poems never shy away from subjects that are unfortunately still considered taboo in today’s social and political environment (sex, masturbation, lost pregnancies, etc.). Ugly Music is a…
Stay, a poetry collection by Tanya Olson, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Loss and departure can be tricky to write about; on the one hand, they’re something that every one of us has experienced in some shape or form, but on the other, that experience can be highly intimate and might not translate seamlessly to readers. Tanya Olson’s work, however, finds a way to make the personal…
Paul Cunningham Reviews & more black, t’ai freedom ford’s second poetry collection

“prehistoric afro futuristic antagonistic / ragamuffin natural mystic slapboxing pugilistic / cosmic slapstick beautiful black lips slathered in chapstick / fucking plagiarists made ya fists twist backwards blackness.” Funked-up with the dark of the Gothic, with the hip-hop of the future, with electric vibrato and too much to swallow, t’ai freedom ford’s & more black…
Wendy J. Fox on Great American Desert, short stories by Terese Svoboda

I was first introduced to Terese Svoboda when I picked up her collection Trailer Girl (Counterpoint, 2001) in a bookstore while I was in graduate school. I still have the hardcover. I was writing my own stories then, but also trying to write a novel for my thesis—well, I thought I was writing a novel,…