August 9, 2019
A Sort of Bricolage: On Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode
New York, NY: Catapult, 2019. 272 pages. $16.95. If you have ever taken a creative writing class or studied the craft of fiction, you’ve most likely been taught that stories […]
August 9, 2019
“I don’t know exactly / what real life is like”: On Thicket by Cate Peebles
Jackson, WY: Lost Roads Press, 2018. 75 pages. $15.00. Entering Cate Peebles’s debut collection, Thicket, is like stepping into a modern fairy tale or fable, replete with animals, primary colors, […]
August 2, 2019
On A Kind of Solitude by Dariel Suarez
Spokane, WA: Willow Springs Books, 2019. 170 pages. $19.95. We enter Dariel Suarez’s Cuba beside the empty bed of a truck. The truck is waiting for a contraband giraffe, as […]
July 26, 2019
On All Its Charms by Keetje Kuipers
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019. 112 pages. $17.00. A one-winged meadowlark mercifully crushed into a road, bats’ shadows gracing a lake beneath a sky laced with powerlines—“a moon so big, […]
July 26, 2019
On The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya
Translated by Asa Yoneda. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. 209 pages. $16.95. Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable […]
July 19, 2019
On Dead Aquarium by Caleb Michael Sarvis
Winston-Salem, NC: C&R Press, 2019. 182 pages. $18.00. Caleb Michael Sarvis’s short story collection Dead Aquarium or i don’t have the stamina for that kind of faith address a simultaneous […]
July 12, 2019
On Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2018. 120 pages. $16.00. “Then my eyes got hungry,” Diane Seuss announces in her fourth collection of poetry, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a […]
July 12, 2019
“This is what we’re doing”: On Eileen Myles’s Evolution
New York, NY: Grove Press, 2018. 240 pages. $25.00. “Growing up, adults always said: if I give it to you I will have to give it to everyone. Well give […]
July 5, 2019
“Not Flowers but Bone”: The Post-Pastoral in Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood
Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books, 2018. 149 pages. $17.95. From the ashes of war, human remains, 9/11, and the clear cutting of America’s once-expansive Eastern forests, Allison Cobb creates Green-Wood: a […]
July 1, 2019
Dangerous Edge
This review appears in the July/Aug 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review Thom Gunn. New Selected Poems. Ed. Clive Wilmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 284 pp. $30. […]
June 28, 2019
“Little fang of light”: On Soft Volcano by Libby Burton
Ardmore, PA: Saturnalia Books, 2018. 55 pages. $16.00. Engaging with Libby Burton’s Soft Volcano, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, comes with a hint of danger, as any volcano […]
June 28, 2019
Brushing Dust from Cluster Bombs: Shara Lessley’s The Explosive Expert’s Wife
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. 80 pages. $14.95. One might consider Yeats’ well-known declaration “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with […]