Category: Reviews & Criticism

“The Page 99 Test”: Joe Milazzo & Crepuscle W/ Nellie

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford We’re standing outside a pawnshop, probably somewhere in Midtown or even Lower Manhattan. The year is 1955, autumn. We’re in the company of John, a “minor character” who may or may not be a…
Poetry Review: Shaun Turner Reads Tasha Cotter’s Girl in the Cave

In her “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson’s speaker “… lives on a moor in the north. / She lives alone. / Spring opens like a blade there” on the moor, and Carson’s speaker explores the relationships between place, time, and all that makes us. In “The Glass Essay,” the speaker’s mother is also a blade…
Poetry Review: Nicholas Carlos Fuenzalida Reads Mathias Svalina’s The Wine-Dark Sea

Taking its name from one of Homer’s most enigmatic and contentiously debated epithets, The Wine-Dark Sea, Mathias Svalina’s fifth book, is comprised of seventy-six poems, each bearing the collection’s title. The nod to Homer, as well as the opening epigraph by Diogenes, lends itself to drawing a connection with another leading figure of the Greek…
Review: Nick Sweeney on Mourner’s Bench by Sanderia Faye

This is not a “Civil Rights Movement” novel. This is a novel in which the Civil Rights Movement occurs around characters. If this was the former, it would be more historical, perhaps grander and more mythical like JFK’s Camelot. The latter, however, allows us to dive into a world and see history as it happens…
Graphic Novel Review: Julia Mae Ftacek Reads How to Survive in the North by Luke Healy

Like the frigid plains it’s set in, Luke Healy’s graphic novel How to Survive in the North is quiet and full of introspective beauty, placing its cast of vibrant, believable characters against a looming red sky with nothing but their bodies and misty breaths, speechless in the face of their shared predicament. And the book…
Fiction Review: James W. Davidson, Jr. Reads Stephen Dixon’s Late Stories

In Stephen Dixon’s intricate story cycle Late Stories, author and retired university teacher Phil Seidel exists alone in the Baltimore home where he and his late wife Abby raised their daughters. Though Phil exercises at the YMCA, shops at the local market, and occasionally dines at his favorite restaurants, he struggles to venture any more…
Book Review: Jacob Singer on My Life as an Animal by Laurie Stone

My Life as an Animal, a collection of interconnected stories, offers a unified voice and perspective, producing the feel of a loosely constructed novel. While the stories focus on a few topics and themes—Laurie’s relationship with Richard, her family and life in New York City, and her pseudo-exile in Arizona—each topic addresses something within the…
“Abstract Grotesquism”: Daniel Miller Reviews Nathan Jurevicius’ Graphic Novel Birthmark

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Both whimsical and grotesque, Nathan Jurevicius’ latest graphic novel Birthmark is a take on an age-old story—that of the hero’s quest. The book’s cover reflects this: our hero, a tooth-like creature with tied-up hair, rides a grub through fiery-orange leaves, his eyes intently forward. The grub’s cuteness,…
C.F. Lindsey Reviews Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames, a new novel by Stefan Kiesbye

“Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames have no place in children’s games.” This haunting nursery rhyme drips with dread and foreboding, and establishes the tone for Stefan Kiesbye’s novel. Set in a small German village, the book is a shining example of classic Gothic literature, but spun with a modern twist. Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames is indeed…