Reviews
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Uselysses by Noel Black
Uselysses by Noel Black is a collection of five, distinct, short books of poetry. The first three books collect introspective and self-conscious poems common in contemporary poetry, distinguishing themselves with imaginative imagery and a unique sense of humor. The fourth…
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Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
A Nevada native myself, I’ve walked through the same ghost towns as Watkins, driven the same barren stretches of asphalt.
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If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
If only we could all go back to that time before all beginning.
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Traveler by Devin Johnston
“One can no more locate the unconscious impulse to a poem among the synapses of the brain,” Devin Johnston writes in the preface to Precipitations, his study of the relationship between contemporary poetry and the occult, “than one could uncover…
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The Event of Literature, by Terry Eagleton
Though prolific, the writer, cultural critic, religious apologist, and British literary theorist Terry Eagleton fights for relevance with each subsequent book. Most of us, if we know his name at all, either recognize him from the somewhat recent spat between…
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Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong
There remain a few shops, labels, and presses in the United States that embody DIY artistic independence in the best way, combining the intensity and existential tenacity of hardcore punk with the zine culture’s relentless focus on aesthetics, history, honesty…
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Ring of Bone: Collected Poems by Lew Welch
Lew Welch has been dead now for 40 years, just about as long as his total time on earth. He disappeared on May 23, 1971, walked out of poet and friend Gary Snyder’s house into the mountains of California, carrying…
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We’re Flying, by Peter Stamm
Most of the characters who populate the stories in We’re Flying were once happy. They were ordinary, but hopeful, representatives of Stamm’s native Switzerland: cheerful parents, loving spouses, young professionals. But, more often than not, we are introduced to them…
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Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating shows effervescence, delight in language, and whimsy, even as it hides more introspective and severe undertones. Taking elements of surrealism from the Ashbery branch of American poetry, Browning also shows elements of Dobby Gibson…
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Parsifal, by Jim Krusoe
Last year, Jim Krusoe completed his Resurrection Trilogy, a threesome of novels (Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You) concerned with what he called “the spongy turf between life and death,”
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Havana Requiem, by Paul Goldstein
Legal eagle Michael Seeley is on his last chance. His Manhattan law firm has warily agreed to take him back but his probation means reining in the waywardness and alcoholism that ruined his marriage and jeopardised his professional standing.
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Dogs of Brooklyn by Susie DeFord
When poets decide to collect what they consider to be some of their best work into a manuscript, there are seemingly thousands of choices to make. Should all the poems be similar in style? What about subject? Should the order…