Category: Book Review
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A Heightened Way of Being: On Aaron Poochigian’s American Divine
By Sydney Doyle The title poem that opens Aaron Poochigian’s latest collection, American Divine, serves as the perfect epigraph for poems that act as rendezvous points for the mythic and the ordinary:
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Fairy Tales with Teeth: A Review of Couri Johnson’s I’ll Tell You a Love Story
By Kym Cunningham In the interest of full disclosure: this review does not pretend to be unbiased (as if writing can be), as Johnson is a colleague and friend of the writer as well as her Co-Editor-in-Chief. It is not often that reading a book makes me feel like a kid again. But that’s exactly…
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Melismas Review: Directly addressing the inadequacy of language
By Hayden Bergman Early in Marlon Hacla’s second chapbook, Melismas, this reader gets the sense that Hacla must speak, though for him, the stakes seem to be much higher than they are for most, and, perhaps, more violent. But maybe that’s too strong a word. The poet speaks of arrival in an inhospitable place, a…
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Book Review: Someone You Love is Still Alive
A geography of sex and violence permeates throughout Ephraim Sommers’s Someone You Love is Still Alive. This energetic text presents readers with contemporary insight into poetic archives that contort racial violence and love, shifting kisses amid murder reports that bend quietly under police badges. Sommers’s pragmatic aesthetic aligns with the vigor of Ai’s fairy-horror narratives…
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Mythic Humor and Personal Vendettas: Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed
By Couri Johnson In his new novel Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed mixes dystopia with myth, the Old West with the Old Testament, and creates a narrative that is full of both humor and dread. His un-named narrator, a goatherd abandoned at a mosque in war-torn Kansas, both garners the sympathy of readers while repulsing them.