Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Stefan O. Rak’s Paranoic Novel New Roses

Paranoia is a tricky beast to capture. I think we can all recognize and relate to it from the outside easily enough, whether in the wild-eyed monologuing of Macbeth and Raskolnikov or the slow-burn panic of classic alienation thrillers like The Conversation and The Parallax View, or the countless ongoing explorations of our evolving surveillance…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s Debut Novel Then Then Then

Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s debut novel, Then Then Then, is told in fragmentary manner. Fragmentary is not quite the right word—it’s hard to describe the pieces, the moments that make up Then Then Then as fragments, because they’re something different. They are layers. DeMer has attempted to create a novel in the form of a mixed-media…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jeff Alessandrelli’s Novel about Sex & Shyness & Society And Yet

And Yet is a written record of a nameless narrator’s effort to make sense of his romantic life. He’s a young adult, busy developing a sense of self, and he sees the way his relationships affect that development. He sees that romantic relationships can foster his selfhood, and also that they can warp it. So…
“A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the Harlem Renaissance”: John Schertzer Reads Jon Woodson’s Novel The Staircase Shuffle

Jon Woodson, professor emeritus of Howard University, most notably author of To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, has of late been self-publishing both his recent scholarship as well as a few novels, collections of poetry, and translations of African writers of merit. I’m a fan of all categories of his…
Poetry Review: Sarah Giragosian Reads Jackie Craven’s Award-Winning Collection Whish

During the pandemic, it was commonplace to hear people talk about how slippery time is. The lockdown dramatized the strange and sinuous qualities of time, the ways that time can stall and slip off the surface of consciousness all at once. These properties of time are difficult to capture, although many poets have tried. Whish…
Poetry Review: Dan Hodgson Reads Diego Báez’s Debut Collection Yaguareté White

By the middle of her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip has worked “English” from a “mother tongue” to a “father tongue” to “a foreign anguish” by rubbing it against what “mother tongues” and “father tongues” mean in relief of slavery-era edicts bent on the “removal of tongue[s].”…
Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody is a collection of 52 poems edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, & Kate Lindroos; they call it “the essential James Tate” and the editor’s note says they thought of it as a “book of beloved favorites.” It’s a slim volume, and every poem in it will give readers the Monty…
“Portrait as Landscape”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White’s Poetry Collection The Under Hum

The Under Hum is a small book that is large and generous in so many ways: double the usual number of authors, and full of lines by modern working poets that “seed” the invented poetic forms and linguistic experiments of this collaboration. The Surrealist feminists have arrived and they come with ghostly memories and scars,…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Brendan Gillen’s Debut Novel Static

Brendan Gillen’s debut novel follows a trio of musicians trying to survive in New York City. Static explores the sacrifices artists make, the realities of who makes it big and who doesn’t, and the messy but sometimes magical process of collaborative creation. The novel is told from the point of view of Paul, who is…