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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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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“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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Scars of Cheerfulness: Hansjörg Schertenlieb’s “A Happy Man”

Wilson JosephsonNovember 12, 2017

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...

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Ethos, Pathos, Clowns: On 49 Venezuelan Novels

Laura KnicklebineAugust 20, 2017

In this arbitrary assemblage of micro fiction, the importance of place is indirectly questioned. Can a person be anchored by what’s most familiar? Can roots fro...

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To Oslo, With Love: Thoughts on Julia Johanne Toho’s New Chapbook

Laura KnicklebineApril 23, 2017

August, and the Snow has Just Melted is like a collection of postcards transcribed from a melancholy language. It’s mixed with English, Norwegian and some heavy...

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The Indecency of Killing Ants: Thoughts on Vivek Shanbhag’s Novella

Laura KnicklebineApril 16, 2017

Shanbhag’s novella begins on an exhale. A nameless narrator sits in refuge at a coffee house. He pins his gaze to the exchanges at other tables in attempt to di...

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Some Further Corrections: A Review of Jack Buck’s Deer Michigan

Max HeidelbergerFebruary 19, 2017

In his 2001 novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, himself a child of Midwest, crafts a Midwest that is culturally repressive, a space in which one happens to...

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The Ontology of Hauntings: Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster

Laura KnicklebineFebruary 5, 2017

Picture a little girl kneeling in a glass field. Remember her knees are nerveless and her blood is a myth.  If it’s difficult to picture a little girl kneel...

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Review of Elysia Smith’s “Unruly”

Laura KnicklebineJanuary 30, 2017

  This is a confessional collection of prose. Elysia Smith sits her younger self beneath a ghost light and pulls the most arcane questions out from her ...

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Of Fathers and Sons: Devin Kelly’s Blood on Blood

Max HeidelbergerJanuary 22, 2017

There’s much that’s been said and written about the rust belt and blue-collar America in the aftermath of the 2016 election. As a cultural group which—very broa...

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Review of Boris By The Sea by Matvei Yankelevich

Laura KnicklebineJanuary 15, 2017

Boris is alone. He finds company with his dark house, his chair, and the sea. But he can’t tell us if anyone else inhabits the world. He isn’t able to let us ...

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A Hysterical Response: Zadie Smith’s “Swing Time”

Max HeidelbergerJanuary 1, 2017

Nearly two decades ago, the critic James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe the work of a group of emerging novelists at the turn of century....

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Review of ‘Killer’ by Kimmy Walters

Laura KnicklebineDecember 4, 2016

Killer is a sparkling, classified experiment full of impossible questions. The first time I travelled through the book, I pulled poems out of the thick air and ...

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Waiting for Death, Or Something Like It: Joseph Parker Okay’s “My Phone Is About to Die & I Hope It Takes Me With It”

Max HeidelbergerNovember 20, 2016

David Foster Wallace’s iconic 90s novel, Infinite Jest, describes a film that is perfect entertainment, so engrossing that viewers can’t look away. Anyone who b...

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Poetry of the Posthuman: A Review of The Plural Space

Max HeidelbergerOctober 30, 2016

The title of Matthew Mahaney’s The Plural Space invites a question: what is the plural space? The plural space could best be described as a liminal place; the...

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The Thing Itself | a Review

Max HeidelbergerOctober 9, 2016

In the acknowledgements at the end of The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts admits that the novel shoehorned him into something of an awkward role: “an atheist writing...

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Review of “Prophet Fever” by Jennifer Hanks

Rachel Charlene LewisJuly 31, 2016

Jennifer Hanks' "Prophet Fever" is a bizarre and molded sparkle in a world filled to the brim with chapbooks that only come close to the success they have undou...

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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 “Father, Husband” by Scherezade Siobhan

Rachel Charlene LewisJuly 10, 2016

This is a thing so bodily that it requires it be felt. Indo-Roma writer Scherezade Siobhan’s full length collection, "Father, Husband," explores through the sli...

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Review of “Ghosts Still Walking” by Do Nguyen Mai

Rachel Charlene LewisJuly 3, 2016

Do Nguyen Mai’s debut collection stuns with stabbing diction and fluid conversation. There is a softness to her sounds, but a violence to her verbs. A sense of ...

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Review of “VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live” by Tatiana Ryckman

Rachel Charlene LewisJune 26, 2016

In Tatiana Ryckman’s debut collection of flash nonfiction, technology meets the body meets the haze of memory. There is a rawness to it, a knowledge that time f...

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Review of “Actual Cloud” by Dalton Day

Rachel Charlene LewisJune 19, 2016

Big things are small soft things, here. In his debut full length collection from Salò Press, "Actual Cloud," Dalton Day talks fear of death, dependence, and exi...

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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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Want to work at Maudlin House?

Mallory SmartApril 29, 2016

Yes, you read that correctly! Maudlin House is looking to inject some fresh blood into the press. Our interviews editor, Olivia Olson, is heading off to grad sc...

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