Reviews
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay

Review: Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich

By Abeer Hoque“St. Petersburg lay under its enormous, grey sky like a carefully posed, regal creature…”Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (LFMB) is Anya Ulinich’s fantastic second book, a graphic novel about love, immigration, and relationships. I read the entire book in...

read more

Review: Fissures by Grant Faulkner

By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Fissures, Grant Faulkner’s collection of 100-word stories, is beautiful in its smallness. Faulkner’s stories are constructed to capture the essence of longer works with acerbic brevity.

read more

Rowland Saifi’s The Minotaur’s Daughter

Review by Mary Burger

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Rowland Saifi takes place in a small, unnamed beach town with a lone second-person narrator who relates the peculiar story of how he comes to live in a sort of reverse exile, left behind after everyone else has gone.

read more

Review: Halle Butler’s Jillian

By Amanda MarbaisHalle Butler’s Jillian is a dark novel delivered in a witty, incisive voice. At times, it resembles a more considered, more satisfying season of Girls, which may speak to its timeliness.Young Megan works a dead-end job for a gastroenterologist. She...

read more

Review: Following the Light by Kevin Bezner

By Bill Cushing

I knew of Kevin Bezner several years before meeting him in 1987, having followed his writing before encountering him in person. His poetry began being published in book form at the start of the nineties, and for those who have never read him, his latest work, Following the Light, serves as both an overview of his work past and present as well as a look at his evolution as a person and a soul in search of his place in the world.

read more

Review: Red Epic by Joshua Clover

By Patrick James Dunagan

Few books, let alone books of poetry, arrive boasting a blurb from Entertainment Weekly while simultaneously, and aggressively, declaring the attempt to establish a Marxist lyric praxis. Joshua Clover’s Red Epic, however, does just this. Red Epic is the first of a projected series of books to be published by Commune Editions, a start-up press Clover along with fellow poets Juliana Spahr and Jasper Bernes established in partnership with leftist, anti-commercial AK Press.

read more

Review: Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy

By Abeer Hoque

Don’t Let Him Know is Sandip Roy’s debut novel in stories. Each chapter stands on its own, but they come together in a tour de force of this structure to tell a story of three generations, reaching from old Calcutta to chilly Carbondale to sunny California. She watched a lonely matchstick of a fry sitting in a smear of ketchup.

The three main characters are Avinash, a closeted gay Calcuttan, his sharp and dreaming wife Romola, and their son Amit. Each is nuanced and real, leaping off the page without sensationalism or gimmick. Their stories, secret or spoken, are told with a light and poignant touch.

read more

Review: The Deep Zoo by Rikki Ducornet

By Heather Mackey
In her essay collection The Deep Zoo, novelist, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet makes glittering connections between art, nature, and myth, beading them upon a string of deeply felt personal inquiry. Allusive and sometimes fragmentary, these essays take the form of crystalline observations, attuned to the pleasures of both language and thought.

read more

Review: Discomfort by Evelyn Hampton and The Coyotes Forgive You by Jim Drummond

By Art Beck
There’s a bumper sticker that I fondly remember from a writing residency in a secluded, artsy town: Port Townsend Washington. We’re all here because we’re not all there. I’m sure other little towns have probably used the slogan, although Port Townsend is the only place I’ve ever seen it. But it also occurs to me that the phrase might apply to nongeographic literary locales as well.

read more

Review: An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck

By Mary Burger
Koki and Demented Panda, characters in An Army of Lovers by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, describe themselves as mediocre poets. I’d be more inclined to describe them as discouraged poets or dispirited poets. Glum poets. Koki and Panda are discouraged because, while they believe more than anything in the power of poetry, they have to admit that poetry does not seem to be making a dent in the forces of evil—war, unbridled capitalism, climate destruction, the rest of it.

read more

Review: Arboreal by Barbara Tomash

By Ann Pelletier
“There was exile all embracing at the center.” This sense of exile pervades Barbara Tomash’s third book of poetry, Arboreal, right from the opening poem (”Light Source”) when a woman recognizes that she is “non-native everywhere in the world.” Throughout the course of the book, we are pulled into a landscape both threatened and threatening. “When the wolves came into the city,” begins one poem (”Relict”). In another (”Floating Gardens”) the speaker muses on the certain future:

read more

Review: Appalachian Night by Mark Jackley

By Karen Biscopink

Minutes after sitting down with Mark Jackley’s new chapbook, Appalachian Night, the power went out in my neighborhood. I completed the required activities: lit our decorative candles; searched for a never-used flashlight, buried somewhere during the recent move; veered between spooky panic and romanticism. Deciding to move forward with my planned reading was a fantastic decision on all counts. In fact, the first poem (“Appalachian Night”), begins, “Enfolded by pure darkness / a train slips through the hills.”

read more

Review: With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst

By Josey Foo
Hilda Hilst wrote With My Dog-Eyes when she was in her fifties. Translator Adam Morris writes in his introduction that as she aged, Hilst increasingly felt that serious provocative literature, literature to “wake people up,” was absent in Brazil, including in her own writing. She felt there was no writing brave enough to properly treat the banalities of modern life with its traditional values, apathy, commonplace poverty, and violence in a way that would, if not enlighten anyone, then provide a means to leave it.

read more

Review: The Gorgeous Nothings by Emily Dickinson

By Maureen Alsop
A particular energy hovers in any visual artist’s studio. Vivid or dank palettes, otherworldly mixtures, the space around the canvas (once the canvas is extracted), various random patterns—splattered paint on the floor, walls, sink. Remnants of a messy, raw, leveling of intention.

read more

Review: Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

By Nancy Smith

Sidewalks landed on my desk during the usual end-of-semester rush. I had several essays due, a stack of papers to grade, and a research project to wrap up. And then summer came.

read more

Review: Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

By Ho Lin
Whither the great modern Shanghai novel? Beijing has its writers of the moment with Ma Jian and Wang Shuo, who capture the ferocity and irony that infect China’s capital. Shanghai is a tougher nut to crack: gilded, slippery, more bustling than feral, hopscotching between East and West.

read more

Review: Insel by Mina Loy

By Maureen Alsop
Modernism, the lost generation’s artistic fate, the avant-garde, surrealism: these are historically inseparable from Mina Loy’s writing career. To the hallmarks that denote these concepts, Insel is no exception. Melville House’s publication of Insel revisits this posthumously published novel and includes the addition of a previously unreleased ending.

read more

Review: The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson

By Karen An-hwei Lee

Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.

read more

Review: Winter Mythologies and Abbots, Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon

By Art Beck
Pierre Michon, born 1945, won the Prix France Culture award in 1984 for his first book, a memoir of sorts, Vies Minuscules. In 2008, an English version, under the title Small Lives, was published by Archipelago Books with partial sponsorship of the French Ministry of Culture. Its translators, Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, were awarded the prestigious French American Foundation translation prize in 2009.

read more

Review: Hank Forest’s Party by Ascher/Straus

By Mary Burger
Hank Forest’s Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica’s Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.

read more

Review: Mirror Gazing by Warren Motte

By Nancy Smith
Warren Motte has been collecting literary mirror scenes for the past twenty-five years—a remarkable, if somewhat curious, undertaking. Motte, a devoted reader who absorbs “a healthy mix of so-called ‘serious literature’ and so-called ‘popular literature,’ ” has kept 3×5 notecards within each book to record the author, title, and page of each encountered mirror scene. His fascinating new book, Mirror Gazing, is a lovely reflection on these many mirror scenes and the peculiar pursuit of collecting. 

read more

Review: Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle

By Emily May Anderson Trances of the Blast’s title and its epigraph from the Book of Revelation conjure apocalypse, the blast from which we can hardly expect to recover. The book seldom deals with literal blasts, however, instead focusing on small everyday explosions...

read more

Review: The Strangers by Eugene Lim

By Paul Vangelisti

As poets may look for languages to think in, some fiction writers search out new contexts to subject to prose. Thus inciting the necessary friction between writing and the world one imagines.

read more

Review: Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, and Joseph Noble

By Patrick James Dunagan  Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, and Joseph Noble will read from their work on the following: Wednesday, March 26, 7pm Canessa Park Reading Series, Canessa Gallery 708 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California The Canessa Park building is in...

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