REVIEW: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
byFiction. 336 pgs. Double Day Books. July 2023. 9780385545150. Long a staple of genre fiction, sequels and series have never held much favor in the blue-ribbon literary scene. Because “works…
Reviews
REVIEW: Low by Nick Flynn
byPoetry. 112 pgs. Graywolf Press. November 2023. 978-1-64445-259-2. It was initially difficult to say whether Nick Flynn’s forthcoming hybrid collection, Low, would be an engagement with the mundane or something…
REVIEW: The Adventure by Giorgio Agamben
byNonfiction. 104 pgs. MIT Press. March 2018. 9780262037594. The fact that the term [adventure]—crucial to the chivalric tradition to which the love poets were so familiar—does not appear in more…
REVIEW: Threshold by Rob Doyle
byFiction. 336 pgs. Bloomsbury Publishing. January 2020. 9781635574142. Rob Doyle’s autobiographical novel, Threshold, is made up of loosely connected chapters taking place everywhere from Berlin, to Bangkok to San Francisco,…
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…
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…