Reviews
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay

More Than “Flyover Country”: Jack Driscoll’s Twenty Stories

Review by Al Dickenson

“The lyricism of Driscoll’s writing is a trait that brings the reader into the stories: when reading, you feel as though you are standing on the porch or sitting in the fishing boat, hanging on every word the characters say, as you feel not for them, but with them.”

read more

Intricate Spaces: A Book Review of House Parties

Review by Valerie Fox

Lynn Levin, accomplished and prolific poet and translator of poetry, has brought her refined aesthetic to House Parties, her debut short fiction collection. As in her poems, she develops characters through distinctive voices and reveals insights by vivid imagery.

read more

Review: Earth Angel by Madeline Cash

Review by Alex Carrigan

In her debut short story collection Earth Angel (CLASH Books, April 2023), Madeline Cash presents sixteen stories that attempt to digest the absurdity and cynicism of late millennials and early zoomers into bite-sized archives of rote human experiences.

read more

Review: Virga by Shin Yu Pai

Review by H. V. Cramond

“The porousness and openness of Pai’s poems, their eternal present, reads not as an avoidance or a fuzzy, COVID decimated sense of time brought on by endless time online. Rather this opening is way of protection through integration.”

read more

Review: Gash Atlas by Jessica Lawson

Review by Alex Carrigan

It’s fairly safe to say that Christopher Columbus ruined the world. The voyage to the New World resulted in colonization, slave trading, and various crimes against humanity that were glossed over when presenting Columbus as this great navigator and adventurer.

read more

While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems by Diane Frank

Review by Wally Swist

Poetic Dynamism, Higher Consciousness, and the Lyric Voice

In considering Diane Frank’s most recent publication, While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, what may be most ostensible is not just this poet’s irrepressible lyricism but an imagistic lyricism embedded with what Robert Bly called “the deep image.”

read more

How Newness Sings: Mud Ajar by Hiram Larew

Review by Toti O’Brien

Hiram Larew’s fifth poetry collection was birthed during the pandemic, mostly (says the publisher’s note) during “outdoors rambles” rather than within homebound insularity.

read more

Review: Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome

Review by Abeer Hoque

Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s memoir, an astonishing literary act of radical empathy. It doesn’t matter how differently you grew up from him, a poor dark-skinned Black gay boy in small town Ohio. You will understand every terrible choice he makes and why.

read more

Review: The Brothers Silver by Marc Jampole

Review by Sparrow

Why read about a family? Why study the story of four individuals you don’t know, who also (in the case of a novel) don’t exist? Jules Silver grows up in Queens with a depressed, suicidal mother and a sullen younger brother.

read more

Review: witness tree by paul m.

Review by Wally Swist

“before daylight touches the hill the backs of the wild geese:”

If the spiritual maxim about finding what is large in what is small and what is small in what is large can be applied to paul m.’s new book of haiku, witness tree, then “The Big Elm” in the “Agawam Meadows” serves as a metaphor not only for what is perhaps most significant regarding not only m.’s haiku but the art of haiku itself.

read more

Review: Dyke (geology) by Sabrina Imbler

Reviewed by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

The morning after finishing Sabrina Imbler’s Dyke (geology) I texted a long-time writing partner to say that if I was still teaching Queer Lit I would add this to the reading list. The desire to include this was not because it echoed the great themes of works like Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

read more

Review: Etudes: A Rilke Recital by Art Beck

Review by Wally Swist

The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars.

read more

Review: The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020 by Jonas Zdanys

Review by Wally Swist

Towards the end of his watershed book, The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020, Jonas Zdanys writes in the poem, “Love,” that “Our lives” are “a vigil/ for something whiter/ than snow,” which represents Zdanys as a reverential poet, one whose reverence is that of the harmony of the intellect and the heart (as in the compassion exhibited in the fourth chakra).

read more

Review: The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet by David Breeden

Review by Wally Swist

It is apt that one of the several quotes from a variety of notable authors prefacing David Breeden’s The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet would include the French philosopher Alain Badiou, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, who writes about such concepts as truth not being either postmodern or a simple repetition of the concept of modernity, and whose philosophy just may be expressed succinctly by the quote used here, “Justice does not exist, which is why we must create it.”

read more

Review: The Blue Absolute by Aaron Shurin

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

The Blue Absolute is a languid historical symphony. Shurin’s images flow in these prose poems. He exploits the affordances of the prose poem form – the nature of the lines without breaks to drive images and actions through their dramatic transformations. At times, he handles this change with a deftness that draws me back over the passages as a metonym of green eyes becomes self and mother.

read more

Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

Pin It on Pinterest