Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“Making Comics: My Graphic Novel Process,” a craft essay by Jess Smart Smiley
New Comic My name is Jess Smart Smiley and I make comics. My newest project is a square, interactive comic called Fantasy Quest, and it’s live on Kickstarter right now. (Oh, don’t worry—there are more plugs for Fantasy Quest to come—but let’s talk process first.) Hamburger Style The earliest comics I remember making were created…
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Conjoining, a poetry collection by Heidi Czerwiec, reviewed by Matt Mauch
As with me seeing the coffiin-esque iron lung in the basement museum of the Nobles County Library, surrounded by photos of smiling polio victims inside various other iron lungs, and making sure I never went to the basement museum alone ever again, any gaggle of able-bodied and world-curious five-year-olds would no doubt concur, upon first…
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Walking Backwards, a poetry collection by Lee Sharkey, reviewed by Toti O’Brien
On the cover of Lee Sharkey’s Walking Backwards, an anonymous oil painting—“Pogroms”, circa 1915. A long line of people crosses from left to right—their clothes the same color of the background, as if the landscape had already started absorbing them, soon to entirely obliterate them. Two of the men look vacuously forward—not far, as their…
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“The Monstrous Maternal in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart”: A Poetry in Translation Review by Jayme Russell
Third-Millennium Heart is awash with red blood, black blood, a flood of names and namelessness. The poems pulse with RED. A stream flows from the poems, filling the exo-heart as the word “mother,” “mother,” “mother” runs RED. With each line the map of the heart grid beats. This heart is growing through a demon incantation.…
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“Ghosts in the Trees”: A Review of Patricia Grace King’s novella Day of All Saints by Rachel C. Reeher
In Patricia Grace King’s Day of All Saints, a young Martín Silva de Choc meets Abby, an American student studying abroad at the Guatemalan language school for which he teaches. Abby’s long blonde braids and hypnotic laughter bring promise of a lovelier life in Chicago, but her presence is a stone in the water of his…
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“Lisa Freeman’s Work Makes Me Angry; Or, The Children’s Crusade”: Lisa Freeman Catalog Essay for January 2018 Show by Jordan A. Rothacker
Lisa Freeman is an artist based in Athens, Georgia, who was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1965. She has worked in the medium of painting, but recently her art has shifted to a focus on assemblage art using found objects. Drawn to discarded objects and photographs, Freeman explores the mystery of the forgotten, allowing the…
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My Shadow Book by Maawaam, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell
The purpose of a book can be something different from one person to the next. A fellow writer once told me that for him, a book can be a temporary escape from the drudgery of the real world. That was more important to him than delivering a message; provide diversion for one person and you…
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“Wormwood,” a critical essay about the six-part Netflix miniseries by Toti O’Brien
Latin, Artemisia Absinth. Ancient British, Warmode. Wormwood is a bitter herb with medicinal properties, related to purification and cleansing. Hamlet mumbles its name in Act III, Scene II, during the play he has staged in order to upset King Claudius. The performance faithfully represents the crime of which he believes the latter is guilty. He…
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Ragged; or, The Loveliest Lies of All, an anthropomorphic crime novel by Christopher Irvin, reviewed by Robert Young
Going into this book, I didn’t really know what to expect. I wasn’t familiar with the author’s other works, so what attracted me to this book was the premise alone: a feral twist on crime fiction, as the book’s back blurb informed me. I was intrigued. My interests were thoroughly piqued. I read onward. A…
