FOMO, lost-love, and the desire to be both liked and not give a fuck what anyone thinks about you are just some of the themes within McCreesh’s debut novel, Chi...
Here we stand at the “nowness” of this thing we call the Internet. A digital refuge. An oasis of calm. A school of art. A profound and elemental place of being ...
If opening with an epigraph from Carmela Soprano doesn’t perfectly envelop the mood of this book of poetry, then nothing ever will. It’s hard to not want to quo...
Tanya Holtland’s debut book Requisite, meaning a thing that is necessary, is exactly that. Its message is blunt but delivered softly. Requisite reads as a cerem...
I’m watching Scream for the 20th time in my life or something close to that. I always listen to something or watch something in the background while writing bec...
I became aware of Big Bruiser Dope Boy and his poetry sometime in 2019, in the months leading up to the release of his first poetry collection, Foghorn Leghorn,...
This novel is surprisingly good. I hate stating that in such a candid way but even I was shocked that a book with such a strange and grotesque title could be be...
The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached by Mark Doyle is a book and a class apart. That is honestly the best way I can describe it and anything else would be a di...
I’ve been bouncing around from book to book these last few months, that seem to have lasted a lifetime. And during this era that we are both sardonically and lo...
Rebekah chose the hotel as a (transitional) waystation between modes of being, modes of identity—modes of being that are transient and both spring from and nece...
Read this book, read it backwards, read the instructions, forget them, and read it again. Mathias Svalina’s, America at Play, is a collection of game scenarios ...
It has become a commonplace to bash the preeminent poet Carolyn Forché for allegedly trauma-seeking, risk-averse poetic practice, especially after her second co...
I never thought I would finish – much less enjoy – a poetry collection solely devoted to our feline friends, but here we are.
Clichés are about currency. If ...
The hunters of meaning had found no meaning. The wanters of dreams were dreamless. Many now drifted toward Hark Morner. This is, like, the back story.
Th...
If the bait-and-switch of the title bothers you, this is not the book for you. The results of approaching this book far outweigh Danez Smith’s previous two coll...
Ah, the Grand Canyon. Purveyor of crushed dreams and desperation, overseer of Vegas excess and western stoicism, keeper of our nation’s hopes and secrets.
&n...
I know I’m late to the party on this one. Ever since Ling Ma’s Severance was published last August, it’s popped up on any number of year-end lists, or best-of l...
Marie Mockett takes umbrage, in her excellent Lit Hub essay “Our Fairy Tales, Ourselves”, with critics and philosophers whose pursuit of universal laws of narra...
Caliban has a good claim to Patagonian ancestry...
There’s a strange connotation attached to ghost towns: folks seem to assume that (aside from the tum...
I doubt I’m the only one here who struggles with collections of short stories. My friend Anne insists that it’s a problem of investment and fatigue: once you’ve...
Whenever my writing career first began in 2015, one of the first voices I became obsessed with was that of Catch Business’s. Not only did her poems become a phy...
The newest collection from Bottlecap Press is Andrew Duncan Worthington’s A Very Small Forest Fire. The twelve short stories he has brought together are funny, ...
“We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Beca...
Death is another kind of absence, one that leaves a sudden, big (enormous) wound that gradually heals, or so it seems to me. Disappearance, on the other hand, m...
A woman grieving the death of her child goes to the Buddha.
She had come to beg the famous teacher to perform a miracle and to bring the infant back to life. “...
Recommendation: Read it in one sitting. Give it to a friend. Stay in touch with that friend. Travel to see them, and be gentle to the other travelers along the ...
Recommendation: the perfect choice for reigniting your rage: shake whatever numbness from your hands, there is work to do. Read aloud with friends; declaim bois...
Recommendation: Bring it with you to the beach. Dip your toes in the water. Close your eyes.
Let us join hands now and sing the full hymnal for that most cur...
