Category: Reviews & Criticism

Review: Nick Sweeney on Of This New World by Allegra Hyde

All writers want to create new worlds. Good writers want to explore new worlds. Great writers want to expose new worlds. In Of This New World, the readers are exposed to twelve beautiful worlds and the inhabitants who survive in them. Allegra Hyde has her fingers on the pulse of today and the particular patterns…
“How a Shark Encouraged Blake Lively to Finish Medical School,” a Haunted Passages essay about grief by Tasha Coryell

Someone is dead or someone is dying before the shark even arrives. Sharks can smell blood in the water, even if this blood is only a metaphor. In The Shallows, the shark has ostensibly been attracted to the beach by the floating whale carcass. In actuality, the shark was attracted by Nancy Adams’ grief. I…
Book Review: Paul Albano on Julian Tepper’s New Novel Ark

Julian Tepper’s second novel, Ark, chronicles a once wealthy, currently inept, New York family, the (sort of) titular Arkins, on their strange, funny, and fraught slide down the socioeconomic ladder, undone by greed, bad luck, and a vexing proclivity for suing each other. Ark is a primarily New York-set novel—not the Gershwin-scored New York of…
Poetry Review: Katie Hibner Reads Crystal Curry’s But I Have Realized It

The genre of bildungsroman, since it literally translates from the Latin into “education novel,” is, by definition, limited to narrative prose. If Anne Carson chips at that barrier with her verse novel Autobiography of Red, Crystal Curry shatters it with the surreal lyricism of her coming-of-age collection, But I Have Realized It. Curry asserts the…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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…