Category

book reviews

Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness

April 8, 2025 | blog, book reviews

Review by Michela Polito, MFA ’25 Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness 244 pp. Guernica Editions. $18.95 In Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, Danila Botha writes with wit, grit, and a sort of fictional non-conformity that resists easy labels. Across this generous collection, she unpacks a range of themes, spanning from alienation, identity, intergenerational trauma, and...

A Review of Evie Shockley's suddenly we

November 15, 2024 | blog, book reviews

Review by Tanner Crunelle, MFA ’24suddenly we112 pp. Wesleyan University Press. $15.95 Evie Shockley’s latest collection of poetry, suddenly we, contains the songs of a poet whose heart is so capacious it’s almost from another planet. We sail with Shockley into an Afrofuturist horizon, equipped with Toni Morrison’s proverb: “I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and...

Demand To Be Heard: A Review of Halle Hill's Good Women

March 14, 2024 | blog, book reviews

Good Women, the debut collection of stories from Halle Hill, follows the intimate lives of Black, southern women as they navigate the socially and politically fraught waters of what it means to be, as the title suggests, “good” women.

Joy Is the Garden: A Review of Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Lace & Pyrite

June 21, 2021 | blog, book reviews

Z.L. Nickels Lace & Pyrite 19 pp. Get Fresh Books. $10.00 The most neglected book of garden poems you have never read is not really a book at all. Rather, it is a reprint of an unheralded contribution to literature’s epistolary project, a small gathering of poems-as-letters by two of this country’s best poets, Ross...

Chasing a Storm: Review of Tariq Shah's Whiteout Conditions

September 16, 2020 | blog, book reviews

Lauren Cortese Whiteout Conditions 115 pp. Two Dollar Radio. $14.99 Tariq Shah’s debut novel, Whiteout Conditions, follows childhood friends Ant and Vince on a pilgrimage through a Midwest snowstorm to a funeral for Vince’s young cousin, Ray, who died under violent, unexpected circumstances. This is Ant’s first trip back to the Chicago suburbs in years...

Mapping One's Creation: Review of Bruce Snider's "Fruit"

June 3, 2020 | blog, book reviews

By Joshua Garcia FruitBy Bruce Snider96 pp. Wisconsin Poetry Series. $16.95 Nearly a decade since Paradise, Indiana reflected on youth like a fever dream of home, grief, and first love, Bruce Snider’s third collection, Fruit, remains mindful of the past yet looks unflinchingly forward. The title, ripe as it is with suggestion—offspring, the temptation to original sin, an...

Landon Houle's Living Things

November 13, 2019 | blog, book reviews

By Matt Manco Living ThingsBy Landon Houle232 pp. Red Hen Press. $16.95 Black Creek, South Carolina, its residents believe, is the type of town people come to because bad things don’t happen there. But when a young woman is found dead in the creek, that belief is challenged. Landon Houle’s debut novel, Living Things, guides...

The Moment, the Memory: Review of Alison Rollins's "Library of Small Catastrophes"

October 29, 2019 | blog, book reviews

By Dakota Reed Library of Small CatastrophesBy Alison C. Rollins93 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $16.00 Alison Rollins’s debut collection of poetry serves as a sharp examination of womanhood and blackness, one that deals with such complex and multi-faceted components by inviting you into the figurative library she has created within her poems. Readers are granted...

New Wave, New Girl: A Review of "Sea Monsters" by Chloe Aridjis

October 22, 2019 | blog, book reviews

By Ren Jones Sea MonstersBy Chloe Aridjis130 pp. Catapult. $23.00 Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis is, above all else, a tale of teenage disillusionment. With its plot woven between a New Wave rendition of Mexico City and the mythically charged seaside town of Zipolite, Sea Monsters follows Luisa—a seventeen-year-old girl whose personality exudes a Siouxsie...

Navigating Reality: Review of Molly Reid’s "The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary"

September 24, 2019 | blog, book reviews

By Grace Timko The Rapture Index: A Suburban BestiaryBy Molly Reid220 pp. BOA Editions. $17.00 The stories in Molly Reid’s debut collection, The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary, resonate with readers through an overarching sense of nostalgia and moments of discomfort. Reid has the distinct ability to navigate dualities—the real and fabulist—both in theme and in style....

The Fearful Beauty of 'Anything': Review of Lee Martin's "The Mutual UFO Network"

November 29, 2018 | blog, book reviews

By Emma Stough The Mutual UFO NetworkBy Lee Martin300 pp. Dzanc Books. $26.95 The legion of characters populating Lee Martin’s forthcoming collection The Mutual UFO Network cause a reader to question humanity’s place among the stars and planets. Martin favors the wanderers—those navigating the untidy shambles of lost love, of families cracked and broken apart, of past and...

Unguided Girlhood: A Review of "The Blurry Years" by Eleanor Kriseman

October 23, 2018 | blog, book reviews

By Christine McSwain The Blurry YearsBy Eleanor Kriseman160 pp. Two Dollar Radio, $15.99 In The Blurry Years, Eleanor Kriseman depicts the particularly tumultuous but ultimately universal growing pains of Callie, a bright young girl living in Florida with her flighty, alcoholic mother. Against a rotating backdrop of run-down motel rooms, the homes of short-term boyfriends,...