Category: Reviews & Criticism

Book Review: Alex Rieser on Laura Walker’s prose poetry collection story

In Laura Walker’s story, a person is a temporary experience and their history can be told many different ways. It’s as though development is a series of changing selves, not just perspectives: “something that won’t dissolve persists, either standing out starkly or never seen.” Prose poems untitled individually and images drawn from some of the…
Fiction Review: Annalia Luna Reads Hasanthika Sirisena’s The Other One

Some wounds never heal. In her debut collection The Other One, all of Hasanthika Sirisena’s characters find themselves in situations where they have lost something that cannot be replaced, whether it is a sense of safety, a family member, or their own mind. Set in Sri Lanka and America, Sirisena uses the decades that the country…
Poetry Review: John Vanderslice Reads Way Elsewhere by Julie Trimingham

Julie Trimingham’s Way Elsewhere, published by the up-and-coming Lettered Streets Press collective, is one of the more hard-to-peg reads of the year, a book that defies genre expectations and renders conventional literary distinctions almost meaningless. And as is almost always true about hard-to-peg books, for the consumer of Way Elsewhere, this makes for an engaging…
Review: Zachary Kocanda on Amateurs, a novel by Dylan Hicks

Amateurs, the sophomore novel by Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and novelist Dylan Hicks, is about the consequences of shooting for the moon—or at least the New York Times Best Sellers list. A twenty-first-century novel of manners in the Austenian tradition, Amateurs spans the mid-to-late aughts, and after a short prologue, its sections are structured as prenuptial and…
Poetry Review: Mike McClelland on John McCarthy’s Ghost County

Don’t be deceived by John McCarthy’s debut collection, Ghost County. The book’s slim size and meticulous organization can lull the unguarded reader into thinking that they are in for a quick indulgence, a one-sitting flick through a stereoscopic tour of the American Midwest. The imagery is well-rendered but familiar, and emotion is referenced, but the narration…
Poetry Review: Jasmine An on The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-en

…In this book, the bees make money in the lion’s fontanel, licked away by the heroin tacky sheets of zero Next chapter in, we girls spit it all out. The end is gold and harm mercurial, and the sea, ashine withmilk and honey, and the sky, amen. In these poems, Lo Kwa Mei-en constructs an…
Fiction Review: Christopher Lura Reads Graham Guest’s Winter Park

Winter Park opens on an airplane flown by a pilot who says things like “scone be bumpy” and a main character who, while tossing back a couple of “G&T’s,” notes proudly to the reader that he is a philosopher. It’s an entry that gives us several clues about what kind of book is awaiting: we…
Book Review: Paul Albano on Matthew Griffin’s Debut Novel Hide

Hide, Matthew Griffin’s tender, funny, and engrossing debut novel, is a love story. But an odd love story, a sort of alchemy between the sturdy, old-fashioned mores of the Greatest Generation, and the newfangled deconstruction, or at least complication of those mores, that frequently mark contemporary literature. The lovers are Wendell Wilson and Frank Clifton,…
Novella Review: Ryan Werner Reads Dan Mancilla’s The Deathmask of El Gaucho

I would assume that writing about professional wrestling is infinitely harder than writing professional wrestling itself. The conceit of wrestling is a simple one, one person saying to another You have caused me personal and/or professional strife and I wish to rectify that within the parameters of a wrestling match. The performances are where the…