Tag: Eric Aldrich

  • Nonfiction Review: Eric Aldrich Reads Marcia Aldrich’s Essay Collection Edge

    Nonfiction Review: Eric Aldrich Reads Marcia Aldrich’s Essay Collection Edge

    I’m reading Marcia Aldrich’s essay collection, Edge, when I get a text from a friend who is worried that he’s found bones belonging to a deer he knows. Edge is largely, though not exclusively, a book about deer, and I receive my friend’s message at the same moment I’m reading an essay in which Aldrich…

  • Heck, Texas, an Atlatl Press travelogue by Tex Gresham, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    Heck, Texas, an Atlatl Press travelogue by Tex Gresham, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    “I’ll start my review of Tex Gresham’s Heck, Texas with a contrast,” I thought. “I’ll look up some wholesome facts about Jasper, Texas, the community profiled in the book, and then highlight ways the town’s officially-projected personality differed from Gresham’s caricature of it.” This was the idea, but it took nothing more than Wikipedia to…

  • Eric Aldrich on John Englehardt’s New Novel Bloomland

    Eric Aldrich on John Englehardt’s New Novel Bloomland

    John Englehardt’s new novel, Bloomland, challenges readers to live and relive a mass shooting at a fictional southern university from three perspectives. Readers follow Eddie, an adjunct composition instructor who loses his wife in the shooting, Rose, a young woman attending the college but not in the library during the violence, and Eli, the shooter…

  • Operating Systems, a poetry collection by Joe Pan, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    Operating Systems, a poetry collection by Joe Pan, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    The title of the Joe Pan’s poetry collection, Operating Systems, refers to the operating systems underpinning society, from the interpersonal to the international, as well as the operating systems of poetry. The collection is divided into four sections of five to seven poems each, and a long prose poem that constitutes all of section five.…

  • Survival House, a story collection by Wendell Mayo, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    Survival House, a story collection by Wendell Mayo, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

    Survival House, a new collection of short fiction by Wendell Mayo, invites readers to experience the ironic fetishization of the Cold War in America. The collection blends compelling characters with borderline absurd imaginings of the Nuclear Age ethos. Mutually assured destruction hovers in the background as atomic diction is repurposed into dad jokes with a…