Category: Reviews & Criticism

The Fire Lit & Nearing, J.G McClure’s debut poetry collection, reviewed by Daniel Casey

Ruminating on alternate paths, detailed speculation on choices not made, and a darkly comic melancholy characterize J.G. McClure’s debut poetry collection The Fire Lit & Nearing. The tone of these poems when they are most successful is casual crafting surreal responses to the mundane facts of living. From the opening poem ‘Odyssey II’ imagining an…
Sara Burant on Richard Greenfield’s latest poetry collection, Subterranean

Subterranean, Richard Greenfield’s latest collection, is a starkly beautiful and haunting book. Situated mostly in the desert Southwest, these poems inhabit a psychic space called grief, a borderland that hems us in and defines our edges, the negative space that shapes our lives. The grief is personal, addressing a father’s death. And it is public,…
After the Death of Shostakovich Père, a memoir by Maya Sonenberg, reviewed by Barton Smock

“I wish you could hear the bells” We are many and we sit in a circle. I light a match for us to pass around. Inquiry is distraction’s lover. Our fathers have died, or will. We have read Maya Sonenberg’s After the Death of Shostakovich Père, a dark music of spiritual interruptions, a predictive diary,…
Wintering, a hybrid poetry collection by Megan Snyder-Camp, reviewed by Dan Alter

More poets seem drawn each year to some version of the genre called “hybrid,” and Wintering by Megan Snyder-Camp is an exemplary book of this kind. The genre involves, usually, a blend of verse and prose, with lyric, documentary and other modes set side by side. Often these extend to a book-length work constructed around…
Téa Franco Reviews Maureen Aitken’s fiction collection The Patron Saint of Lost Girls

In Maureen Aitken’s collection The Patron Saint of Lost Girls, linked stories sure to compel and move, Mary grows up in Detroit, where poverty, addiction, and death are all parts of her daily life. A story of triumph over violence, poverty, sexism, and more, Mary displays resilience throughout her childhood and young adulthood against the…
You Could Stop It Here, Stacy Austin Egan’s debut fiction chapbook, reviewed by Kim Loomis-Bennett

Stacy Austin Egan’s prose chapbook, You Could Stop It Here, is an encounter with a memory snag that just won’t smooth out: youthful regrets, missed chances, and ultimately transformative ordeals that wake us in the middle of the night—rumination from an adult perspective. Like encountering someone you used to love in an unexpected time and…
Brat, a graphic novel by Michael DeForge, reviewed by Ryan Werner

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. For years now Michael DeForge has been building these fucked-up worlds that sit on top of and inside our own world all at once, as if there’s a dimension we can’t comprehend where we’re all just twigs or neckless shapes with the same problems of simply not…
The Book of Transparencies, a literary detective novel by Jefferson Navicky, reviewed by Laura Nicoara

The Book of Transparencies begins (or does it?) in 2005 when an unnamed narrator, an adjunct professor at a community college, comes across a “slim anomaly of a book with an ash blue cover” in the library. This is the (other) Book of Transparencies, written by William Bolzebados three decades before, an autobiographical “collection of…
Zuri Etoshia Anderson Reviews The Death Scene Artist, Andrew Wilmot’s debut novel

What makes an actor? Do they have to have star-studded fame, perfect teeth and a reputation for great acting? Or do they have to be closet catastrophes, marred by drugs, relationship issues, anxiety and identity crises in order to create their stardom? Why not both? Andrew Wilmot addresses these types of questions and more with…