Everything Awake: A Review
by COLIN DEKEERSGIETER Credit: Shearsman Books Sasha Steensen, Everything Awake (Shearsman Books, 2020), pp.90. Sasha Steensen’s Everything Awake is a poetry driven by the vertigo of life’s work,...
View ArticlePhysical Geography as Modified by Human Action: A Review
by KYLAN RICE Credit: Partly Press Jordan Dunn, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press, 2022), pp. 84. In a chapter on the lumber industry in Man and Nature, Or, Physical...
View ArticleA Long Time to Be Gone: A Review
by KYLAN RICE Credit: Carnegie Mellon University Press Michael McFee, A Long Time To Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), pp. 72. In a notebook from the 1930s, Robert Frost wrote out a recollected line...
View Article“History / And Fear”: A Review of Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson
by KYLAN RICE Credit: Slant Books Richard Michelson, Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant, 2023), pp. 88. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno tempered his often-quoted claim that it’s “barbaric” to...
View ArticleThe Other Woman
by Erin Blue Burke Her pool is a private one, a gated community of exercise, and everyone who sees her swimming back and forth from end to end knows she wants to be left alone. Many of them have had...
View ArticleIndigo: A Review
by ELLIE RAMBO Credit: Catapult Books Padgett Powell, Indigo (Catapult, 2021), pp. 223. If I were to start the review of this book the way many of the essays within it begin, I would open with a...
View ArticleRealityCheck
by Jake Slovis We heard about RealityCheck from Anne and Tom. They said it had really worked for them, that since they’d started playing, they hadn’t fought once. The evidence of their success was...
View ArticleSyncopated Sensibility: Review of Sevastopol
by CELIA LEGBAND HAWLEY Sevastopol, Emilio Fraia, New Directions Publishing, 2021. Possibly the best advice I can give you about reading Emilio Fraia’s 2018 novel Sevastopol is: Do not let your first...
View ArticleBewilderness: A Review
by BEE GRAY-ARMY Bewilderness, Karen Tucker, 2021, 288 p. In our current moment, addiction is as familiar to most Americans as a regularly scheduled television program. In fact, 22 million people are...
View ArticleProofs of Purchase
by George Singleton My father left me with two pillowcases of dimes and nickels, separated. He left a note atop the bags, stashed in the back of a tool shed, saying he started saving when I was born,...
View ArticleThe Naomi Letters: A Review
by MARY SIMS Credit: BOA Editions Rachel Mennies, The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021). Rachel Mennies’ The Naomi Letters opens with a question, an invitation to devotion: “The love poets say...
View ArticleNight Rooms: A Review
by DONAL MACADAM Credit: Two Dollar Radio Gina Nutt, Night Rooms (Two Dollar Radio, 2021). Gina Nutt writes that horror in film is “a reaction, recognition, a response to a call.” Nutt is the author...
View ArticleAn Assembly
by Chelsie Bryant Grandma Owens didn’t often invoke the Lord’s name in vain, but when the news hit that another child had been murdered, she let loose a quiet “Lordy.” It was nearly silent, the...
View ArticleThe Fugitivities: A Review
by SHANA SCUDDER Jesse McCarthy, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021). Credit: Melville House Jesse McCarthy’s debut novel The Fugitivities asks the weighty and perhaps unanswerable question: what...
View ArticleJesse DeLong’s Poetic Chemical Reaction: A Review of The Amateur Scientist’s...
by DEREK WITTEN Jesse DeLong, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook (Baobab Press, 2021). Credit: Baobab Press Anyone who has vaguely intuited an unknown poetic language behind terms like electroweak,...
View ArticleBad
by Mathew Goldberg Saturday, we attended Safety Day at Davy Crockett High School where Levi got to sit in a fire engine, helicopter, and police car. In early October, summer assaulted Austin a second...
View ArticleWaterbaby: A Review
by MINDY BUCHANAN-KING Nikki Wallschlaeger, Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Credit: Copper Canyon Press Reading Nikki Wallschlaeger’s third collection of writing is an immersive experience....
View ArticleSkin Like You
by Sarah Walker It is the first time I have been home in seven years. I watch the windows, fixed on the blobs of light inside. I wait for the house to turn completely dark and when it does, I climb the...
View ArticleBreath Like the Wind at Dawn: A Review
by MATTHEW POTTS credit: Sagging Meniscus Press Devin Jacobsen, Breath Like the Wind at Dawn (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2020), pp. 208. Scary stories are probably about as ancient to human culture as...
View ArticleSeeking Utopia: Queer and First Nations Embodiment in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A...
by JAMIE WATSON Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Two Dollar Radio, 2020), pp. 142. What does it mean to have a brief body, to wonder when one will truly feel here, now? How much...
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