Reviews of books in the literary world
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: Continue reading “A Heightened Way of Being: On Aaron Poochigian’s American Divine”
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 what Couri Johnson’s debut short story collection, I’ll Tell You a Love Story, manages to achieve: a suspension of belief, that hunger to consume—more and more—pages curled beneath a comforter with a flashlight in hand. Continue reading “Fairy Tales with Teeth: A Review of Couri Johnson’s I’ll Tell You a Love Story”
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 place that’s both familiar and foreboding:
After I was returned to the primeval nature
of the ordinary, I felt as if an eruption
of words went off in my chest. I suspected
movement of the divide that stifles the articulation
of whatever it is I let roll across my tongue,
that night has fastidiously gathered from nearby places
Continue reading “Melismas Review: Directly addressing the inadequacy of language”
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 in Dread and stands firmly with the dynasty-naming skills displayed in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. Throughout 69 dynamic poems, his use of documentary and investigative poetics incorporates intimate scenarios that engage current topics ripped from contemporary news headlines. Continue reading “Book Review: Someone You Love is Still Alive”
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 by longing; babies are born by being found under the sink; and lovers are turned to goldfish and are flushed away. But behind all the fantastic conceits in this collection remain very real, very poignant questions that will cut readers to the bone. Questions about what it means to be a man, questions about what it means to have a home, what we owe our families, and why these things often hurt more than they should. These are the fables of the modern-day—the stories that place us in myths and dreams that distort the world around us so that we might see it all the more clearly. Continue reading “Strange Landscapes of Loss and Longing in Michael Credico’s Heartland Calamitous”
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. Continue reading “Mythic Humor and Personal Vendettas: Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed”
