|
|
Review by Mark Reep
Kio Stark’s first novel, Follow Me Down, is the story of Lucy, a young woman who flees the struggles of a drug-addicted brother for a neighborhood of New York where “…there are bodegas and men loitering on the corners, teenagers taunting each other. Sometimes what you want is to be somewhere you do not belong.” Withdrawn and melancholy, Lucy is most comfortable among strangers, observing rather than revealing, and evades new lover Jimmy’s questions about her past: “Being known is what most people want, but it makes me want to run.”
Lucy collects old plastic
» Continue reading Follow Me Down by Kio Stark…
Michael Dickman – Flies 978-1-55659-377-1 81 pp, $16.00 Copper Canyon Press
Review by Nick DePascal
Michael Dickman’s second collection of poetry, Flies, winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award, is a fitting follow-up to The End of the West, retaining what made his stunning debut memorable and fresh, while extending and deepening the reach of its themes and content.
Also still present in Flies is Dickman’s arresting use of enjambment, lack of punctuation, stanzas rarely longer than three or four lines, and an obvious love of white space. Part of what makes Dickman’s syntactical and line breaking stylistic choices
» Continue reading Flies by Michael Dickman…
Review by Dawn West
Despite the multiple references to modern life—McDonald’s, Walgreens, cash for gold—there is something timeless about Tiff Holland’s seizing little heart of a chapbook, Betty Superman. Mothers and daughters. Strength and weakness. That sticky mess between life and death. Holland’s stripped, unsentimental prose is a pleasure to read, a worthy vehicle for this mother and daughter’s lives, irrevocably tied to one another, one recovering and one not. Holland illuminates the everyday, flipping what we do and say to each other on its back, telling it to open those gams and get ready.
She begins with what she
» Continue reading Betty Superman by Tiff Holland…
Us by Michael Kimball Tyrant Books, 2011 184 pages
Review by Chris Vola
In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen, decrying technology’s suctioning of deep human emotions (i.e. “liking” a video of a kitten playing the piano versus deeply caring about someone), writes that “the ultimate goal of technology…is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.” That our current
» Continue reading Us by Michael Kimball…
Traces by Tom Rechtin Chapbook Pudding House Press 2010
Review by Tom O’Connor
While reading Tom Rechtin’s Traces, I was reminded of Edward B. Germain’s stirring description of surrealist poetry:
among the worlds we know, the surrealist poet is drawn to three: the world of objects (rats and brooms and garbage), the world of abstract ideas (insurance policies and laws), and the world of desire, unconscious desire that recognizes events in the other two. What we desire surfaces through the unknowable maze of the subconscious to reappear with hallucinatory fascination as money or lovers, forgetting or remembering, fears, objects and
» Continue reading Traces by Tom Rechtin…
Short Flight / Long Drive Books, 2010 Book I: 278 pp. Book II: 184 pp.
Review by Tobias Carroll
On the desktop before me as I set out to write this review are two volumes: specifically, the two parts of Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels. The designs are complementary: on one appears the title, Novy’s name, and about twenty birds; on the other, the birds have increased in number and, grouped together, resemble a particularly sinister cloud. That’ll be the last time I refer to the two books separately: for all intents and purposes, this is one long novel divided
» Continue reading The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy…
Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter. New York: Pantheon Books, January 11, 2011. 416 pgs. $27.95 cloth.
Review by Ian Singleton
One word to characterize Charles Baxter’s fiction is “haunting.” The potential for surreality of his stories drives a contemporary reader of late realist fiction mad with wonder—in a word, haunted. Continuing his rich and varied body of work comes Gryphon, the just published collection of new and selected stories. I believe Frank O’Connor said he felt horrible for any writer whose work was subjected to such a collection. Perhaps he was right, but the opportunity to give
» Continue reading Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter…
Review by Tobias Carroll
The California-based press Flatmancrooked is fond of alternate editions, experimental funding models, and neatly planned deviations from what might be expected from a publisher, small or large. Recent and forthcoming work that they’ve released has included novellas from Alyssa Knickerbocker and Emma Straub, along with Shya Scanlon’s Forecast, a novel originally serialized online. And while the stories told in James Kaelan’s We’re Getting On are compelling, the book has attracted as much attention for its carbon-neutral construction and Kaelan’s tour of the West Coast by bicycle. What you make of We’re Getting On may well
» Continue reading We’re Getting On by James Kaelan…
Monkeybicycle 7
Monkeybicycle 7
Monkeybicycle has been pumping out the jams for years now, but even so, MB seems to be hitting a new stride. This is next level shit. The MB mothership has landed. You need to open up a copy, have a look, and let MB do it to you in your eyeball.
Chopsticks by Ryan Boudinot
Ryan Boudinot is back with a brand new invention. His story “Chopsticks” is a sharp turn, if not a total one-eighty, from his last MB offering, “The Mine”. But fear not, this is not unfamiliar water. “Chopsticks” is funny and
» Continue reading Your Main Readerman 7: Monkey Shines by Timmy Waldron…
Review by Tobias Carroll
It’s hard to think of another collection in recent memory that covers as much stylistic ground while still maintaining a high level of quality as Matt Bell’s How They Were Found (Keyhole Press). It follows last year’s chapbook How the Broken Lead the Blind — and, typing this out now, there’s a sudden recognition that the titles of the two collections, taken together, begin to imply a story of their own. Two of the longer stories in How They Were Found initially appeared as standalone chapbooks: “Wolf Parts,” a sort of deconstruction of Red Riding Hood,
» Continue reading How They Were Found by Matt Bell…
|
