book review – Maudlin House

How Shootings Go Viral: A Review of Jeff Chon’s Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun

Mallory SmartApril 20, 2021

On this day 22 years ago news coverage about Columbine spread rapidly, and broadly. By the time the shooters exhausted all their energy from firing at their cla...

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Odd and Lonesome and Fascinating: A Review of Hosho McCreesh’s Chinese Gucci

Alana M. KelleyDecember 15, 2020

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...

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“A “Collected Works” Comprised of All the Times Your Life Fell Apart” / A Review of Brian Alan Ellis’ Sad Laughter

Alana M. KelleyNovember 30, 2020

I’ve never wanted to both go to waffle house more often and never go to waffle house ever again. Brian Alan Ellis asks us “...isn’t this a fucking ...

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WHAT PERMITS OUR IMAGINATION: A Review Of The Internet Is For Real by Chris Campanioni

Mallory SmartNovember 25, 2020

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 ...

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Grief; Love; Nostalgia: A Review of Rachelle Toarmino’s ‘That Ex’

Alana M. KelleyNovember 2, 2020

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...

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A Love Unendingly Deep: A Review of Tanya Holtland’s Requisite

Alana M. KelleyOctober 28, 2020

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...

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Strength, Perseverance, and Resilience: A review of “Final Girl” by Lauren Milici

Mallory SmartOctober 9, 2020

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...

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Not Drowning but Waving: A review of LAKE OF URINE by Guillermo Stitch

Mallory SmartAugust 11, 2020

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...

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Face to Face: A Review of “The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached” by Mark Doyle

Mallory SmartJuly 13, 2020

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...

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Condemned to the shadows of Joy: a Review of Comaville by Kevin Bigley

Mallory SmartMay 4, 2020

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...

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Transformative Analysis: a review of Rebekah Morgan’s Hotel Alexander

Blake WallinApril 17, 2020

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...

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America at Play

McKenna ClarkeMarch 15, 2020

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 ...

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About Time: a review of Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World

Blake WallinMarch 13, 2020

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...

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Replacing Furballs with Truffles: a review of Juliette Sebock’s How My Cat Saved My Life

Blake WallinFebruary 14, 2020

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 ...

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“We Swim Out Forever”: Jack C Bucks’ Gathering View

Mallory SmartAugust 1, 2018

This first collection by Jack C Buck is uncompromising and hopeful. Split into three sections, the poems come together to form a narrative that ta...

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A Review of Quick Fix by Ctch Bsnss

Shannon CawleyJuly 27, 2018

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...

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Review of Dragons by Melissa Dickey

Laura KnicklebineDecember 18, 2016

During birth, mother and daughter become strangers. Motherhood is a foreign concept, not as instinctive as expected and a daughter remains a strange, inanimat...

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Review of “Evergreen” by Sarah Frances Moran

Rachel Charlene LewisJuly 24, 2016

It remains ridiculously important to discuss things like sexual violence in the world at large, but, specifically, in the poetry world, and in her poetry collec...

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Review of “I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris” by Elizabeth Hall

Rachel Charlene LewisJuly 17, 2016

I am very much the sort of aggressively-obsessed-with-vaginas type who is drawn immediately to books like Elizabeth Hall’s "I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitor...

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Review of “A Galaxy Of Starfish”

Mallory SmartMay 25, 2016

A Galaxy of Starfish is the metamodern ephemera untainted. The alt-lit experiment celebrated. Sexy cerebral automatism. Rivers of poems that flow directly into...

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