Category: Book Reviews

Book reviews written for the blog by our fantastic staff and contributors!

Emily Austin’s Debut Novel and Being Dead Someday

Melissa Wade The cover of Emily Austin’s debut novel presents visual insight into the book’s core dichotomy. In a design by Kelli McAdams, lollipop-colored rabbits bound with life in neatly...

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Correlatives: A Review of W. Todd Kaneko’s This is How the Bone Sings

Christian Stanzione I was a natural reader for W. Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies, a book that examines the pageantries of professional wrestling to access and discuss his relationship with...

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Bradley Bazzle Writes Unique Fiction With Familiar Skin in New Collection

Tim Johnson Bradley Bazzle describes his new fiction collection, Fathers of Cambodian Time-Travel Science, as an “alchemical mixture of realism and complete bullshit.” As I read it, I decided I...

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Writing from the Body: Felicia Rose Chavez’s’ The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

Shabrayle Setliff The statement that everyone writes from the body could serve as a litmus test: if such a statement seems untrue or if it is, perhaps, unfelt, it may very well indicate a person’s...

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Imagination as Inheritance in Lilly Dancyger’s Memoir Negative Space

 Lena Crown In the dedication to Lilly Dancyger’s debut memoir, Negative Space, out from the Santa Fe Writers Project this May, she writes, “For my father, Joe Schactman. And for everyone living...

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Timelessness & Innovation in Tracy Zeman’s Empire

Ana Pugatch Tracy Zeman’s debut collection, Empire (Parlor Press, 2020), contains the hallmarks of a skilled ecopoet: an expansive scientific lexicon and a tendency to eschew the didactic, for...

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Horror With Authenticity: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians

Timothy Johnson We who like the scary, dark, and macabre tend to leap at the chance to claim a successful piece of literature or film as one of our own. We revel when a work of horror writhes its way...

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A Review of Jenny Bhatt’s Each of Us Killers

Bareerah Y. Ghani Jenny Bhatt’s debut collection, Each of Us Killers, holds fifteen raw, disturbing, and heart wrenching stories about a society where the scales of power are forever tipped. It...

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Sigrid Nunez Asks How Should We Live When All Seems Doomed

In her poignant and meditative new novel, “What Are You Going Through,” Sigrid Nunez writes as if we sit with the narrator in her living room, listening to her thoughts on companionship, on...

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Colors of Easter: A Review of Rick Barot’s During the Pandemic

On the penultimate page in my copy of During the Pandemic, Rick Barot’s poignant new chapbook, I am told: “You are holding No. 77.” The numbers are penciled onto the page in a small, neat...

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