Tag: Book Review

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Strange Landscapes of Loss and Longing in Michael Credico’s Heartland Calamitous

    By Couri Johnson In Michael Credico’s debut collection of short stories, Heartland Calamitous, he takes us from fever-dream to fever dream in a strange and fragmented Midwest. Corpses bloat in backyard pools for days, dissolving alongside a marriage; a bear is taken into a family to replace the son he devoured, only to be devoured…