Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Kristina Marie Darling
From the very beginning, readers are conditioned to focus on the words that appear on the page, their semantic meaning and the larger architecture of plot and theme to which they give rise. It is not often that writers ask us to look away from the text proper, to consider what is possible within the margins of a literary work, or even within the small spaces between the words themselves. Yet... more
Reviewed by:
Kelli Ebensberger
In her debut collection The Bed Moved, Rebecca Schiff emerges with the biting tongue, warm affection, and well-advised hindsight of a rom-com best friend—in the best possible way. Some of these stories found original publication in places like n+1 and Guernica as early as 2006, and ten years later this collection unleashes its pent-up, raw energy like a box of suburban... more
Reviewed by:
Carrie Chappell
Few words bewitch the senses quite like those that recall the world of food. And even fewer ignite the prosaic ear in worlds of poetry. Yet, Lilah Hegnauer did not choose to call her second collection “Snickers bar,” “bell pepper,” or even “cellar door.” Pantry—winner of the 2013 New Southern Voices Book Prize selected by D.A. Powell—arrives in humble felicity. Here, among the canned,... more
Reviewed by:
Ted Mathys
There is a well-worn creative writing cliché that a writer must “find” her voice. The Internet drips with advice for the aspiring writer looking to do this, some of it reading like self-help lit for those trying to professionalize. In a blog post titled “Find Your Poetic Voice” on the Writer’s Digest website, for example, Laurie Zupan writes: "I realized that what I didn’t have was a... more
Reviewed by:
Michael Magras
In Film According to François Truffaut, the great director of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim says, “I always preferred the reflection of life to life itself. If I chose books and films, from the age of eleven or twelve, it’s because I preferred to see life through books or films.” Truffaut wasn’t the only one who felt this way. For some people, film isn’t just a... more
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Reviewed by:
Lucy Silag
Leslie Jamison’s first novel, The Gin Closet, is told from the alternating points of view of Stella—a thin-spired, quarter-life-crisis sufferer living unhappily in New York—and her fat, alcoholic Aunt Tilly, shunned by their family and spending the last of her miserable days in the Nevada desert. The two are brought together when Lucy, Stella’s grandmother and Tilly’s mother, dies after... more
Reviewed by:
Sara Jaffe
Like music, stories have dynamics. There are the louder and the softer moments, the crescendos and the rests, and the author achieves these expressive elements through a careful mix of tone, language, and plot elements. It’s difficult, in literature, to pull off an abrupt dynamic shift—unlike, say, in rock music, where it can be enough for the Pixies to launch from a whispered verse to a chorus’s... more
Reviewed by:
Jeremy B. Jones
In college—my first extended time away from home—I found myself suddenly caught up in the phrase, “in the mountains.” When I’d try to tell people where I was from, I’d finally offer an explanation: back in the mountains. It was the preposition that struck me. I wasn’t from on a mountain. I didn’t exist upon them or around them, behind or in front. I lived in—... more
Reviewed by:
Sarah Kosch
I picked up Barbara Henning's Thirty Miles to Rosebud because it was summer and a blurb on the back cover compared it to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Perfect, I thought. Some adventures with the car window down and the feel of hot wind blowing the driver's hair is just what I want to read on a day like this. And I wasn't disappointed. Henning's independent and insightful... more
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Reviewed by:
Kristina Marie Darling
In Carlo Matos's stunning third book of poetry, Big Bad Asterisk, readers will find "science projects," Jeopardy matches, and "the blood of princes." It is Matos's ability to seamlessly weave together vastly different points of view that makes his work so compelling. Presented as an ongoing series of annotated prose pieces, much of the work in this formally inventive collection reads as a conversation between different characters, as... more
Reviewed by:
Sean Patrick Hill
From the outset of Graham Foust’s poetry career, his work has sought to answer the question posed in his first book, Leave the Room to Itself: “What is the poem.” Over the course of three intervening books, Foust has explored the function of language, attempting to map this faintly-Romantic notion of “the poem,” a slippery presence one finds embodied in consciousness. This consciousness—its origins, its signifiers, its longing for... more
Reviewed by:
Carrie Chappell
Certain topics are so heart-wrenching that we find them difficult to express in literal terms. Lauren Berry’s debut collection The Lifting Dress—winner of Penguin’s 2010 National Poetry Series, selected by Terrance Hayes—explores the possibilities of figuration in post-traumatic narrative by opening up a broader palate of symbolism to confront the violence of one of the most monstrous human transgressions: rape.Set in the humid-yawn of... more
Reviewed by:
John James
A significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue on translation, Mary Jo Bang’s new version of Dante’s Inferno will certainly turn a few heads. Not only does Bang abandon the author’s renowned terza rima, she uses allusion and colloquialism to render the epic’s esoteric political backdrop accessible to today’s readers.To most Dantists, this new "translation" may purport sacrilege, but translators of contemporary poetry will... more
Reviewed by:
Nick Ripatrazone
Rose McLarney’s debut collection feels born of the same world as Irene McKinney’s first book, The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap. Both collections mine the grain and coarse chaff of the American pastoral, where “golden apples / glow in sheer skin,” and yet “Their weight breaks branches . . . and you fall in fruit.” McKinney moved from direct representations of her dark pastoral in later collections, yet those poems still contained the... more
