REVIEW: Pale Townie by Tom Will
byPoetry. 46 pgs. Apocalypse Confidential. July 2023. 9798987366219. Why would someone take the end rhymes of poem-within-novel “Pale Fire” and repopulate its heroic couplets with an entire new book of…
Reviews
REVIEW: Father, Husband by Scherezade Siobhan
byPoetry. 112 pgs. Salo Press. December 2015. 9780993350818. “Poetry,” believes the great Don Patterson, “must transport you from the ground to the sky.” If Scherezade Siobhan has done anything at…
REVIEW: The Brittanys by Brittany Ackerman
byFiction. 272 pgs. Vintage June 2021. 9780593311738. Oh, to be fourteen again. To experiment with webcams, go out on first dates, and waste time at the mall. To make best…
REVIEW: The Martyrs, The Lovers by Catherine Gammon
byDisclaimer: Bridge Eight published Catherine Gammon’s previous novel China Blue, winner of the Bridge Eight Fiction Prize in 2021. Fiction. 316 pgs. 55 Fathoms. March 2023. 9781942797333. When you read a…
REVIEW: The Status Revolution by Chuck Thompson
byNonfiction. 288 pgs. Simon & Shuster. January 2023. 9781476764948. “When a sitting U.S. president can defend the virtue of Nazis and Arbeit macht frei becomes a rallying cry in the…
REVIEW: Almanac of Useless Talents by Michael Chang
byPoetry. 120 pgs. Clash Books. September 2022. 9781955904216. Text-speak closer to truth, sex so sexy it’s sexless, a lexicon collaged from the remnants of y2k paranoia and its subsequent cultural…
REVIEW: A Book About Myself Called Hell by Jared Joseph
byHybrid. 141 pgs. Kerpunkt Press. February 2022. 9781734306545. Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell is a book about Dante’s Inferno, the first cantica of the 14th-century epic poem…
REVIEW: Bark On by Mason Boyles
byNovel. 363 pgs. Driftwood Press. February 2023. 978-1-949065-18-3. Submit, submit, submit to the cadences, the novel told me, to the neologisms that open up new perspectives on character and action,…
REVIEW: Kneel Said the Night by Margo Berdeshevsky
byHybrid. 130 pgs. Sundress Publications. November 2022. 9781951979423. From its gorgeous cover to its final author’s note (fittingly circling back to the epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston, “No hour is…
REVIEW: The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers
byFlash Fiction. 78 pgs. Rose Metal Press. October 2022. 978-1-941628-27-0. In an author’s note at the end of The Anchored World, Jasmine Sawers explains her love of fairy tales—both Western…