Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Fiction Review: Greg Marzullo Reads Troy James Weaver’s Marigold
For the depressive, a bouquet of blooming roses is more for funeral arrangements than Valentine’s Day, and every moment is a gateway to a bleak eternity. Troy James Weaver evocatively captures the sense of otherness lingering on the borderlands between life and death in Marigold, an impressionistic chronicle of a florist’s suicidal ideation. As if…
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Graphic Novel Review: Karl Schroeder Reads Ricardo Cavolo & Scott McClanahan’s The Incantations of Daniel Johnston
In Daniel Johnston’s early years in Texas, when he was just beginning to find an audience, in order to give someone a copy of his album, he’d have to run back home and record the whole thing over again, from start to finish, in a single take. Aside from illustrating his technical limitations, this detail…
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Nonfiction Review: VHS & Why It’s Hard to Live by Tatiana Ryckman
Memory is built from pieces of itself: perfect enough at best, like a glued-together mirror or you or me. This makes the fragmentary personal essays of Tatiana Ryckman’s VHS & Why It’s Hard to Live both a curious and not-so-curious delivery of memoir. The short bursts of recall accurately transcribe the way our minds work,…
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Natural Wonders, a novel by Angela Woodward, reviewed by Katie M. Flynn
Benjy, first slide, please. So begins Angela Woodward’s innovative and allegorical novel about, well, everything. We find ourselves in a lecture hall at some point in the twentieth century. The instructor, known only as Jonathan, whose specialty is “jaw measurement,” is giving a slideshow presentation for his introductory course on the earth and its prehistory…
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“This, being absorbed”: Alicia Wright on Gale Marie Thompson’s New Poetry Collection Soldier On
“I only wanted for to see / the spectral light,” writes Gale Marie Thompson in her first collection of glistening poetry, Soldier On. Yet it is not as much the idea of light that governs this collection, more the gesture of “hand[ing] each other daffodils in the dark,” that speaks to the sort of intimate…
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John Brown Spiers on Cynan Jones’ Novel Everything I Found on the Beach
It is possible to say that Everything I Found on the Beach is a novel of rabbits. They enter, innocuously enough, as food; the restaurant manager of a seaside hotel asks Hold, his fishmonger, if he can hunt down a dozen or so for the kitchen. Before the hunt, Hold tries to convince the mother…
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Fiction Review: Eric Andrew Newman on Battle Rattle by Brandon Davis Jennings
What Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is to Operation Desert Storm, Brandon Davis Jennings’ Battle Rattle is to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Both books are a meditation on the experience of what it’s like to live through the thick smoke of war, while at the same time contemplating the disconnected alienness of returning to a home you no…
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Review: Erin Flanagan on Sara Majka’s Story Collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In
From the very start of Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Majka plunks the reader into a world where opposites coexist: coming and going, marriage and divorce, the past and the present. She prepares us to have our expectations upset, to see the contradictions our lives bear and how our worlds can hold disparate concepts—love and…
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Daughters of Monsters, stories by by Melissa Goodrich, reviewed by Trent Chabot
At first glance, the absurdism that permeates the stories in Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich is what jumps off the page at the reader. Goodrich opens the collection with “she wants, she gets,” a unique twist on the known fairy tale of Cinderella: the narrator continually morphs into different animals as the story progresses,…
Heavy Feather Review 