Johnson comments on the circumstances that informed many of the poems in the narrative, autobiographical book: watching films with her parents; learning about her father’s work as a bomber pilot in the Air Force during Cold War; and working with her parents’ principal and patient caregiver, Donna.
Triptych in Color: On Caroline Johnson’s “The Caregiver” Read More »
The novel takes the reader on a tour of a not-too-distant American past, when fear was weaponized and righteous rage boiled over. Smyer’s debut explores themes of the self in chaos; the prose is clean as bone and the anger is focused and piercing.
Rage In America Is Not New: On Adam Smyer’s “Knucklehead” Read More »
The brilliance of Millennial Roost is Pearson’s ability to explore dark, difficult conversations, but with the consideration and wherewithal to do so without perpetuating pain.
The Epistolary Ambivalence: On Balance in Dustin Pearson’s “Millennial Roost” Read More »
The feat of the poet to narrate their own departure from this conscious earth is rare and poignant. As distorted and masticated as the imagery is, Ritvo is a reliable guide, treading equally the known world, the unknown, and the ethereal.
Until It Is One Round Tail: On Max Ritvo’s “The Final Voicemails” Read More »
Lyrical, brooding, and delightfully dreamlike, the novel is a strange and ruthless journey into the ailing heart of humanity—and a bizarre peek into the mind of a brilliant new novelist.
An Ink Droplet in a Glass of Water: On “The Natashas” by Yelena Moskovich Read More »
In a moment in which our country’s various wars, Revolutionary, Civil, World, and otherwise, are trawled for something to give meaning to our present calamities, studying the Kellogg brothers’ era and milieu is a refreshing and much-needed reminder that much of the reason why daily life looks the way it does owes not to generals or presidents, but to the works of scientists and businesspeople.
It isn’t the answers of healing and redemption that Saterstrom celebrates, but rather the questions themselves, which forever circle overhead in the rapturous, uncertain, electric, and paradoxical present.
Rupture, Revelation, and Reading-as-Being: On Selah Saterstrom’s “Ideal Suggestions” Read More »
Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “Why Literature?”, his 2001 essay for The New Republic, that “literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens in a timeless land, and in this way immortal.” Though Vargas Llosa is specifically referring to literary fiction, the same feeling pervades Carl Dennis’s extraordinary thirteenth collection of poems, Night School.
A Kosmos of Buffalo: A Review of Carl Dennis’s “Night School” Read More »
Nodding to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Rancourt’s chapbook engages with the devastating effect of disease on love and on collective and personal memory.
To See More Clearly: A Review of Jacques Rancourt’s “In the Time of PrEP” Read More »
The raw energy within the novel is uncontaminated, fierce, and dedicated toward a singular purpose: to peel back the reader’s eyes and force them to bear witness to the plight of America’s original inhabitants, lest we forget that non-natives are but immigrants or the descendants of immigrants to this country.
Unsuspecting Bodies: A Review of Tommy Orange’s “There There” Read More »
