Category: Reviews & Criticism

Book Review: Zachary Kocanda on Chelsea Martin’s Novella Mickey

The epigraph for Chelsea Martin’s novella Mickey is a lyric from the song “3 AM” by Matchbox 20: “It’s all gonna end and it might as well be my fault.” It’s an appropriate introduction because pages later, the narrator breaks up with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey. Yet this VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the…
Everything We Don’t Know, essays by Aaron Gilbreath, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Aaron Gilbreath’s Everything We Don’t Know is a collection of essays about growing up, coming to consciousness, and taking responsibility for one’s actions and inaction. These intimate and honest essays tell stories about mistakes Gilbreath makes and harms he inflicts, and ultimately they’re also about his slow and winding journey toward compassion and care. Not…
Fiction Review: December Cuccaro on Amanda Marbais’ A Taxonomy of Lies

Amanda Marbais weaves together metamorphic myth, science fiction, and current literary style to give us her debut chapbook, A Taxonomy of Lies. Transformation and omniscient narration are hallmarks of fairy tales, but Marbais uses both to successfully subvert expectations and tie together traditional fairy tale elements with modern malaise. Undercurrents of dissatisfaction and miscommunication run…
Fiction Review: Gabriel Welsch Reads The Pavilion of Former Wives by Jonathan Baumbach

It’s easy to feel distant at first in Jonathan Baumbach’s new collection of fictions, The Pavilion of Former Wives, due to what appears to be an initial bland affectation. The author suppresses the excess of detail and sensory noise that marks the contemporary condition for many, shaving away to the skeletal essentials of conflict in…
“Back in the USSR”: Leonard Kress Reviews Bill Berkson’s Russian Notebook Invisible Oligarchs

Bill Berkson, who died in June 2016, was one of the last survivors of the original New York School that included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, poets who seemed equally at home in the world of art, or at least the New York art scene. The headline of his New York Times obituary…
Wendy J. Fox’s novel The Pull of It, reviewed by Mary Anne Bordonaro

In her novel, The Pull of It, Wendy J. Fox tells the story of Laura, an unemployed young woman from Washington with a husband, Julian, and little girl, Anne, who travels to Turkey on what was meant to be a short, solo vacation to rest and reevaluate her life. What started as a two-week escape…
Poetry Review: Emily Brown Reads Lunch Portraits by Debora Kuan

In Debora Kuan’s Lunch Portraits, the everyday is silly, surreal, and biting. There is an abundant playfulness, both of language and subject matter, style and execution. In these poems, Kuan blends tongue-in-cheek references to movies, childhood memories, and medical maladies in ways both stunning and heart-warming (and at times, nausea-inducing). At the center of these…
“Watching in the Dark”: Jayme Russell on Puncture Wounds Left by Tony Trigilio’s Dark Shadows

Inside the Walls of My Own House Every shadowy story should invoke the uncanny. Tony Trigilio keeps dreaming (and writing) of his uncanny space, at home with his mother in front of the television screen. Space and time billow and unfold as he remembers watching Dark Shadows and being transported to gothic Maine: an electronic…
Poetry Review: Charles Theonia on Cat Fitzpatrick’s Glamourpuss

Trans self-making is fraught with cis people’s associations of deception and the desire they project onto us: our transexual prime directive to leave the past behind and enter an unrippled state of always-having been, by any means necessary. But we each have at least one self, and of course we shape them. Cat Fitzpatrick’s funny,…