Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fish Boy, a poetry collection by John Gosslee, reviewed by Tammara Hoyt

“In the car he says, the important thing is that you’re okay.” Some fathers go beyond the call of duty to be there for their children, picking them up when they fall, setting them on their feet, hoping, believing in progress, even when those children are adults. Throughout Fish Boy, John Gosslee focuses on one…
Dameion Wagner reviews Emari DiGiorgio’s poetry collection Girl Torpedo

As luminaries Allison Joseph and Natasha Trethewey have already noted, DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo is a book that’s needed—needed to remind her readers that this struggle, this deep human yearning to be whole and to share, to recognize and to understand, and to call out is at no truce or ceasefire. Like the ever-present, heavily-armed battleship…
How to Carry Scars, a debut novel by Dana Green, reviewed by Wendy J. Fox

Dana Green’s debut novel How to Carry Scars is both a manual for loss and a warning against unresolved grief. The women of this book are surrounded by accidents and longing, and Green’s tender approach towards her characters creates a story of empathy that cuts through the heartbreak and leaves readers wanting more. While Olivia’s…
Situ, a novel by Steven Seidenberg, reviewed by Micah Zevin

According to Merriam-Webster, in situ is defined as “in the natural or original position or place.” So it follows, in Steven Seidenberg’s Situ, that an unnamed entity is engaged in an intellectual and exploratory dialogue/discussion with itself, and its relationship to a bench. At times, Situ is a seriously philosophical text, in the vein of…
Barton Smock Reviews Erik Rasmussen’s Novel A Diet of Worms

I. ERASURES I’m not sure how old I was when two boys with a few years on me told me in Sunday school that god gave us hands to keep our arms from falling off. I didn’t believe it, of course, except when I did. Same goes for Erik Rasmussen’s A Diet of Worms. Youth…
“The Brilliant, Bright-Red Bowels of Bonnie Chau’s All Roads Lead to Blood”: A Review by Jesi Buell

“The Wolf was a Wolf, and had an innate wolfishness, which manifested itself in his longing to devour The Pretty Girl, tear her apart and slurp her down whole.“ All Roads Lead to Blood is a collection of loosely linked short stories from Santa Fe Writer’s Project’s 2040 Books Prize winner Bonnie Chau. Each story…
Ordinary Misfortunes, a poetry chapbook by Emily Jungmin Yoon, reviewed by Callista Buchen

Chosen by Maggie Smith as the winner of Tupelo Press’ Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Emily Jungmin Yoon’s chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes considers sexual violence against women, investigating the varied forces that enact and normalize it, while also focusing on what such violence means for women. In particular, as Ordinary Misfortunes weaves together historical and contemporary times,…
“Literary Shrapnel”: New Micro, a fiction anthology edited by James Thomas & Robert Scotellaro, reviewed by Bryan Jansing

When I was in the Navy in 1991 I found a book at the Exchange that would change my life. The book was Sudden Fiction: American Short Short Stories edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard. It set a course in my life. I wanted to write fiction, I wanted to write stories. But I…
Unlanguage, an undead workbook novel by Michael Cisco, reviewed by Paul Dee Fecteau

I am not going to assume you’re here because you received the workbook in some innocuous way that in retrospect seems increasingly mysterious—say, a stranger handed it to you on a busy train platform or an unknown colleague stuffed it into your department mailbox. I acknowledge plenty of such stories are circulating on social media…