by JOHN MARCHINKOSKI The man on stage can’t explain how it feels to burn. Nothing describes the sensation well enough. The fluorescent stage lights overhead remind him of the burning. He considers invoking them, but the audience doesn’t know their … Read more

by PAUL BLOM Deepak Unnikrishnan. Temporary People.   Restless Books, 2017, pp. 227. A suitcase sprouts limbs and eventually turns into a man. A woman tapes shattered bodies back together. Laborers are grown from seeds. A revolution grows from seeds … Read more

by ANNEKE SCHWOB Valeria Luiselli. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  Coffee House Press, April 2017, pp. 136.  Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican writer whose novels and essays are formally complex and often surreal. In 2015, having … Read more

by KYLAN RICE Lit Up by Chris Glomski.  The Cultural Society, 2017, pp. 96.  In his new book Lit Up (The Cultural Society, 2017), Chris Glomski shows what lyric poetry looks like in the neoliberal age. When he writes in “Lyric,” … Read more

by DAVID JACOBS Have you heard about the lake in Tanzania that’s so alkaline it preserves the bodies of dead animals in a calcified state, fixing them in a lonely permanence? Or the rare autoimmune disease that turns soft tissue … Read more

by BENJAMIN J. MURPHY Rebecca Kauffman. The Gunners. Counterpoint Press, 2018, pp. 224. Mikey is going blind, but he is our window into the small realism of Rebecca Kauffman’s second novel, The Gunners (Counterpoint Press, 2018). Though Mikey is apprehensive … Read more

by OLIVIA NEAL Olivia Gatwood. New American Best Friend. Button Poetry. March 2017. pp. 60.  “when they call you a bitch, say thank you. / say thank you, very much.” This is the powerful final line of Olivia Gatwood’s debut … Read more

by BRIAN CRONWALL So, I called your cellphone, left a message on your land-line, texted, emailed, faxed, sent a letter first class, left a note on your car, carved words on a park bench and a bamboo stalk, had the … Read more

by CHRISTOPHER RING Dry lightning lit on a ridge five miles off just as Jules crouched down to urinate. By sheer luck she had squatted on the southwest corner of the tower. Nothing told her to look that way, butshe … Read more

by TARAS V. MIKHAILIUK David Biespiel. The Education of a Young Poet. Counterpoint Press, October 2017, pp. 192. Part memoir, part imaginative recollection, David Biespiel’s Education of a Young Poet (Counterpoint Press, 2017) participates in two major traditions of Western literature. Unlike … Read more