Articles in Book Reviews
Cramped Uptown
by Amy Temple Harper
34 ppg, Hard Cover, bound by Spork Press
Review by Travis Catsull
Cramped Uptown is the first book from Amy Temple Harper and it’s a thing of beauty and imagination. A very strange …
Review of The Flood, a book of poetry by Chiwan Choi
Book review by Nathaniel Kostar
Los Angeles based poet Chiwan Choi’s the flood from Tia Chucha Press is a monster of a first book (181 pages) …
Book Review – God Collar by Marcus Brigstocke
by Ben MacNair
Transworld Publishing – ISBN 978-0-593-06736-9
Marcus Brigstocke is a well known comedy face on Television, a well known comedy voice on Radio, and God Collar is his …
“The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the world into a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift away from the ‘ever more’, in the world of finance but also in science and technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and a sustainable balance prevailed…”
The Radleys by Matt Haig
Canongate – ISBN 978 1847 678614
Review by Ben McNair
It is never easy growing up. Trying to find your way in the world, trying to excel in school, and avoiding the bully, …
Christopher Barnes Reviews Transgay Poetics by Richard Livermore
RAINBOW COLOURED CAT’S CRADLES
Christopher Barnes reviews Transgay Poetics by Richard Livermore
Published by Chanticleer Press £4 from 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh EH3 6HN
In his collection of 7 essays Richard …
Asunder
Fiction by Robert Lopez
Dzanc Books, November 2010
Paperback: 165pp; $16.95
Review by Alex Myers
A dense collection, Asunder is half short stories, most of them very short, and half a novella-in-shorts. In the first section …
Head Off and Split by Nikky Finney
Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, February 2011
Paperback: 97pp; $15.95
Review by JodiAnn Stevenson
Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split is a collection of 27 poems arranged in 3 sections titled, “The …
Creating the Impossible
A review of Nick Admussen’s Movie Plots
by Nathaniel Kostar
Nick Admussen’s Movie Plots is an original new chapbook published by Epiphany Editions. In 30 prose poems that take on the titles of different …
Dart by Alice Oswald
Published by Faber and Faber
Review by Cameron Self
Dart is unusual in that, although it comprises a sequence of poems, it is essentially one long poem – detailing the journey of the River …
Drive By: Shards & Poems by John Bennett
Lummox Press, San Pedro, CA
ISBN: 978-1-929878-09-3
140 pgs, $15.00
I will simply put it this way; I think that John Bennett is one of the best goddamn writers of short …
Winner of the 2007 Spire Poetry Chapbook Award
Now That We’re Here
(c)2008, Elizabeth Rees ISBN 13: 978-1-934828-01-4, $8.00.
“It is surprising to find in any book so many poems which reward patient reading, so many …
In these days of politically correct, non-subversive, bad-for-the-queer-movement sex negativity, it’s incredibly refreshing to see someone celebrate the sluttiness queer life has to offer despite all those wholesome images HRC displays …
Review of LUNCH POEMS by MARK YOUNG and DELTA BLUES by SKIP FOX and LUNCH POEMS by Mark Young
Reviews by EILEEN TABIOS
So-called perfection in poetry doesn’t interest me. Having said that, when I …
Review of The Red Buddha
by B.L. Kennedy
The Red Buddha
Maia Penfold Hcolom Press
Ellensburg, WA
ISBN: 978-0-9776783-3-4
169 pgs
$15.00
One of the hard things about being a literary critic is not always agreeing …
The Wasp Factory is written in the first person and the viewpoint character is a sixteen-year-old boy named Frank Cauldhame. Frank is not an average teenager and, young though he is, he has already got …
Winner of the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize, Mayweed, Frannie Lindsay’s third collection, weaves lyrical textures of grief and healing. Lindsay’s poems are accessible and musical, each winding an arc of …
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
by Ben Macnair
In 1985, a 21 year old Bret Easton Ellis released his first novel, Less than Zero, and the controversial novel of hedonistic youngsters living the …
Caramelo
by Sandra Cisneros
Knopf, 448pp., $24
No one ever said that writing an epic novel is easy. Writing a good epic novel is even less easy. Leslie Marmon Silko, in describing the process of writing the sprawling, …
Review of James Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk
One is easily impressed by James Tate’s credentials. After all, he has been the celebrated oddball/bad boy of American poetry for a whole generation now. …
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds
By Lyndall Gordon
Reviewed by Polly Longsworth
Among a spate of biographical and fictional works about Emily Dickinson pouring forth this year is Lives Like Loaded Guns, …
The Really Funny Thing About Apathy By Chelsea Martin
Reviewed by Laura Ellen Scot
Sunnyoutside, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934513-24-8
Paperback, 68 pp., $13
The rhetoric swings from playful to paranoid in Chelsea Martin’s The Really Funny Thing About Apathy, …
Review of Jeannette Walls’, “Half Broke Horses”
by Travis Catsull
Last year my favorite book was The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls so when she released her 2nd book, Half Broke Horses I purchased it the day …
A Pitch of Sonic Ecstasy: Stuart Krimko’s “The Sweetness of Herbert”
by Adam Fitzgerald
I first encountered Stuart Krimko’s work at the 11th Street Bar Reading Series, one of the most distinguished in New York City. …
Texas Death Row: Reflections of a Different World
Edited by Jennifer Gauntt, Julia Guthrie, Trina Kowis, H. Dave Lewis, Shana Templeton, Robert Uren, and Linda Wetzel
Following on the heels of the highly …
In The Bird’s Breath by Marcia Roberts
64 pages, isbn 0-9794745-7-4, printed and bound in an edition of 471 copies by Effing Press
Review by Jessica Bixel
Reading “In The Bird’s Breath” by Marcia Roberts is like …
Book review of I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley
Review by Salvatore Ruggiero
What does it mean to give a voice to the voiceless — a mouth to those who have been underrepresented …
A Mouth in California by Graham Foust
Flood Editions 2009
Review by Ray McDaniel
This book performs one of my favorite miracles, a classic because it’s a repeater, a novelty that never fades: it demonstrates that the impossible …
Hecate Lochia, Hoa Nguyen, Hot Whiskey Press
Review by Daniel Casey
It is perhaps most relevant to begin reviewing Hoa Nguyen’s ferocious poetry collection, Hecate Lochia, with a brief consideration of the title. With a nod toward …
Black Stone by Dale Smith
(Effing Press, 2007)
Review by Nicholas Manning
I have a problem with Dale Smith’s new collection, and this problem will take some explaining.
First, let me state that Smith’s poetry is …
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