Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…