Category: Reviews & Criticism

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,…
“The Page 99 Test”: Tony Trigilio & Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Page ninety-nine opens the final section of my new book, Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2. This page is a key pivot point for…
“The Page 99 Test”: Laurie Stone & My Life as an Animal

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Damn you, Ford Madox Ford. I wanted to be done with a friend I had turned into a character in My Life as an Animal. Then I read page ninety-nine, and there she was…
“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…