by prfire | Apr 6, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Re-reading A Lover’s Discourse in 2017, it’s hard not to consider how Roland Barthes’ impatient Proustian temperament in love might stand to update. Surely Barthes would be hitting ‘refresh’ incessantly, texting with ‘Read’ receipts on, sitting on his hands.“The...
by prfire | Mar 28, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
In her latest poetry collection, 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson manages something exciting: she captures the visceral quality of embodiment—and its corollaries like desire and materiality—while offering those experiences to reader through the meditative filters of...
by prfire | Mar 13, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Rhonda Ganz’s day-by-day structure for Frequent, Small Loads of Laundry makes the reader think Wednesday’s child is full of woe. She is, but much more beside. As a first book, the voice, the care, and the self-reflection are remarkable. Unrelentingly personal...
by prfire | Mar 2, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
When I open a new book of poetry, I always have the sense that I am stepping into unknown territory. There’s a feeling of jittery excitement, of hesitation too—should I even be entering this place? What happens when you step inside a poem anyway? In this instance, the...
by prfire | Feb 20, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Like a demon wearing a porcelain mask that sits on your shoulder, whispering sweet crypticisms in your ear, Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet captures the alluring texture of nightmares. Though neither horror nor fantasy in any traditional sense, the stories that...
by prfire | Feb 5, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
These are northern poems—scraps from the end of winter, out of a landscape of hard snow and mud, where “sewers plume,” tulips—and other hopeful, bright things—are “nipped by frost,” and sidewalks are still “gravelly” with road sand in spring. In Claire Kelly’s debut...
