Category: Reviews & Criticism
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The Mad Feast, an ecstatic food tour by Matthew Gavin Frank, reviewed by Vivian Wagner
Let me just say at the outset that The Mad Feast is a frenzied, delirious ride of a book. This collection of fifty essays travels around the country, through Matthew Gavin Frank’s mind, and into the nether regions of America’s culinary heritage. It’s an exploration of pleasure and sexuality, food and loss, slavery and cannibalism,…
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Poetry Review: Sandra Hunter Reads Antidote for Night by Marsha de la O
Poetry is no easy way to understand why we are here on this planet; . . . A poet achieves the essential on the page, for a moment, and then that moment is gone. —Ilya Kaminsky: A Conversation, with Tatyana Mishel, Cranky Literary Journal As a UK transplant, I’ve lived in California since…
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Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda Reads Softby Ryan Werner
There’s not much to writing rock and roll music. A popular quote says all you need is three chords and the truth. Researching this quote, I learned that it was about country music (from Harlan Howard), but it applies to rock and roll, too. In fact, Lou Reed said one chord was fine, and two…
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The Spectators, a new graphic novel by Victor Hussenot, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter
*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. 1. Victor Hussenot’s newest graphic novel, The Spectators, is his first published in English, and, well, it isn’t really a graphic novel at all. Or, it is and it isn’t. It is. (A note to my wife: this isn’t another opinion piece on misnomers and the politics…
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Book Review: Caleb Nelson on Nate Marshall’s Poetry Collection Wild Hundreds
Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds is a story about amnesia and national shame. In these poems, Marshall presents us with a host of difficult subject matter. He shows us high school dropouts and troubled towns with troubled teens. He shows us the deeply embedded systems of control and oppression in our places of leisure and work.…
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Book Review: John Brown Spiers on Vertigo, short stories by Joanna Walsh
Vertigo is the kind of book it’s easy to let yourself be fooled by. It is smaller than the average prose collection. It is shorter. It has a very low number of lines per page, something you might realize if you flip through it or glance at a screenshot. These facts will make an impression…
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The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, a novel by Leland Cheuk, reviewed by Ben Duax
The Asian American experience is a history of erasure. Generations of Asians in America have been forced to deal with attempts to define them as uniquely other, from the Angell treaty of 1880, which limited ships arriving in America to no more than fifteen Chinese, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war.…
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Nonfiction Review: Vivian Wagner on Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, a memoir by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe tells the story, on one level, of Lori Jakiela’s search for her birth mother. She encounters more than she expects in this search, however, and the story ends up being as much a self-exploration as it is a search for someone outside of herself. It’s a complicated,…
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Fiction Review: Mika Kennedy on The Farmacist by Ashley Farmer
The digital is often framed as a site of contagion—one can contract fatal viruses (or send them). One can suffer the pollution of good ol’ American values—the allure of exotic chrome and pixels from the Silicon Valley proving altogether too enticing. Indeed, the Valley itself was once good ol’ American farmland, before wresting technological eminence…
Heavy Feather Review 