Category: Reviews & Criticism

Love Songs for a Lost Continent, Anita Felicelli’s debut collection, reviewed by Mahnoor Khan

Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent is a collection of stories that is deeply-rooted in everyday labors of identity as we go through life—as friends, parents, lovers, and individuals. They are stories of people who are not looking to be heroes but are characters who find themselves facing their worst. As the author…
Clues from the Animal Kingdom, Christopher Kennedy’s fifth poetry collection, reviewed by Jonah Davis

When the life we are born into isolates us, leaves us in an inescapable malaise, when ‘pain is the only feeling’ and we’re forced to watch time pass by through the eyes of an animal—where do we go? To religion? Family? Relationships? No. Here there are no gods, here family is but an empty word…
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,…