Diane Wald crafts a richly atmospheric and emotionally layered narrative, exploring themes of identity, guilt, and redemption through Violet’s journey of painful self-discovery. Vividly capturing both the familial eccentricities of an artistic community and the complexities of human relationships, this tender, unflinching story follows Violet’s struggle for self-forgiveness, becoming a moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
A review of Everything Must Go by Dan Flore III
In the flash fiction of Dan Flore the conflict could go either way, and often, to his readers’ benefit, it does. Everything Must Go does indeed entertains, and often his protagonist’s pain is his reader’s pleasure. The poet and memoirist John Yamrus’s introduction gives readers a good perspective on Flore’s work.
A review of Habitats: Poems by Katharine Whitcomb
In Habitats, it is with an accessibility and elegance that Whitcomb transports readers onto the highway, staring back in the airplane, switchbacking on the trail and across the harbor ferry. Habitats opens the aperture, disclosing intriguing moments in a rich atmosphere of spaces crafted with wonderfully strange detail.
An Uneasy Utopia, Bright yet Bloody: Jordan Rothacker’s The Shrieking of Nothing
The story connects in many ways to its predecessor, 2020’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, but stands on its own as a wild, conceptual, playfully written ride. And though hints of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Aldous Huxley abound, it is utterly original—principally because its world is neither utopian, nor dystopian, but somewhere uniquely in between.
A review of Jenny, 52 by Susan Montag
Jenny, 52 is a kind of meta fiction about the nature of storytelling, fiction versus reality, in a manner reminiscent of Philip Roth (My Life as a Man, in particular, and all of the Nathan Zuckerman novels generally). Jenny, 52 is made up of seventeen one- to three-page “chapters,” most of which are narrated in the voice of the writer Jenny.
A review of The Flowering Dark by Sue Lockwood
There is a lightness of touch here coupled with an assuredly quiet voice that has an expansive quality, equating the intellectual and the botanical, the flowering of ranunculus with human flowering, and the sensual nature of the earth with the rest of the universe. The poems deftly change their perspective through space and time so that all times feel concurrent and all things seem equal, continually in the state of transformation and yet always available.
A review of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
At once informative and poetic, Hong’s writing is infused with sharp wit and biting irony, making it both engaging and nuanced. Minor Feelings serves as an essential guide for those navigating multiple identities and offers both lay and scholarly readers a profound understanding of the vast literary and artistic contributions these marginalized communities have made to the ever-evolving landscape of American culture.
A review of Cold Truth By Ashley Kalagian Blunt
I read this book in just over a day, pushing back other commitments because I couldn’t bear to stop. The book is full of suspense which Kalagian Blunt creates in all sorts of ways. The most notable is her terrific characterisation. The main protagonist, Harlow, drives the narrative forward with just the right combination of intellectual acumen, warmth and anxiety. The reader becomes invested in Harlow and her desperate search for her missing father Scott.
A review of Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies by Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali is a literary artist and polymath who so delights in language and possibility that he created a chrono-synclastic infundibulate safe space wherein physics are presented in a way that makes the moon even lovelier to poets and presumably presents poetry as lovely to physicists. Ali learned “how to use [his] breath to experience [his] body and the external world with deeper focus and deliberation.”
An interview with Stuart Nadler
I spoke with Stuart over Zoom to discuss the dangers of beauty, the difficulties of depicting atrocity in art, and the value of humor in dark times.