Tag: Brooklyn Arts Press
-
“the sun I can afford”: Zachary Kinsella on Protest and Compromise in that’s what you get by Sheila Maldonado
that’s what you get, Sheila Maldonado’s second full-length collection, offers rich, emotional weight with a kind of ease that is both precise and involved. Maldonado describes injustice, anger, and conflict in a style unwilling to dwell or become obsessively attached to what she cannot control. Through largely unpunctuated verse, that’s what you get advises us…
-
Fiction Review: Ray Barker Reads Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly
Even courageous readers have likely never encountered a character with the overwhelming physical mass and intellectual presence of (northern) Siberian oaf, and oversized tribal chief, Muzhduk Ugli the Fourth. Muzhduk is the three-hundred-pound blond-bearded protagonist that propels Alexander Boldizar’s oddly unforgettable debut novel, The Ugly, to its fairytale end. The novel ostensibly details the life…
-
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…
-
Poetry Review: Thomas Cook on Confidence by Seth Landman
Confidence is divided into three roughly equal sections, each of which comprises a single long poem, each long poem comprising a few dozen long stanzas comprised of short lines, no more than a beat or two and without punctuation. The book’s lyric moves, therefore, at the pace of the speaker’s one-to-two-beat flitting thoughts, formally reflecting…
-
The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom, a new poetry collection by Noah Eli Gordon, reviewed by Alex Rieser
Noah Eli Gordon’s The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom is a text that takes up the struggle of the word itself. Kingdom weighs in at a boisterous 158 pages and is the longest of Gordon’s thus far eight poetry collections. In this text, as with anywhere else, words are all powerful, capable of defining,…
-
BJ Love Reviews His Wife Erika Jo Brown’s Book, I’m Your Huckleberry
My wife wrote a book. A good book. A good book of love poems. Some of them, the poems, aren’t about me. Enough of them are. And a quick glance at the acknowledgements will show you that, even so, this book is for me. I’m the Love the book is “for.” My name is BJ…
-
The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, fiction by Matt Runkle, reviewed by Mike Jacoby
The title of Matt Runkle’s forthcoming short story collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, led me to expect some fables featuring animals loving and tricking one another, perhaps for the sake of a moral lesson. I’ll save you from that misperception by saying Runkle’s collection is fairly animal free,…
Heavy Feather Review 