Reviews Archives - Page 190 of 218

Things That Work Are Muffled and Mute

Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Valerio Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle…

Read

Player One

The latest novel from Douglas Coupland critiques contemporary culture, but lacks fresh perspectives.

Read

Soften the Razor’s Edge, the Reign of Terror

Many poems, and many more lines, couplets and quatrains in Opal Sunset are superb, making their lesser companions wan imitations of what Clive James can really do when his interior…

Read

Why They Cried

These stories by Jim Hanas are about something important: how much suffering arises in the gap between our public identities and whatever kernel of self is left inside.

Read

The Marriage Artist

In Andrew Winer’s insightful novel, an art critic struggles with his wife’s infidelity and suicide, and a painter deals with life in Hitler’s concentration camp by creating Jewish marriage contracts.

Read

10 Mississippi

This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.

Read

Sprawl

“Dear Mrs. McLuhan: The end of a tube of toothpaste can cause guilty feelings and a sense of alienation. It’s a question of family values. You make the call.”

Read

Read

A Dialogue at the Core of Her Being

Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous.

Read

The Wake of Forgiveness

Bruce Machart’s debut novel channels Cormac McCarthy, while narrating a Southern gothic tale centered around women.

Read

Dear Old Dad…

Anthony De Sa’s novel imagines two lives—a father who leaves one country but fails to thrive in another, and the son who spends his life trying to figure him out.

Read

Read

Black Hole Sun

Ultimately, though, it's the cadence of the voice that engages the reader. Slant rhyme, and skillfully enjambed couplets and tercets, are the real shakers.

Read