THOUSAND STAR HOTEL by Bao Phi Coffee House Press (2017) 110 pages reviewed by Brian Satrom What authors empathize with in their work can reveal a great deal about their perceptions of themselves. The poem “Not a Silverfish,” toward the end of Bao Phi’s second collection, Thousand Star Hotel, has the speaker imagining the perspective of […]
Reviews
Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
Poems in Water by Mary Langer Thompson
(reviewed by Carol Smallwood)
POEMS IN WATER by Mary Langer Thompson Green Fuse Poetic Arts (2014) 57 pages reviewed by Carol Smallwood Every poetry collection creates its own sense of space: geographic, cultural, and personal: word selection and use are fingerprints of each writer. The reader tastes a new world and if the poet is good, the world is […]
Velvet Rodeo by Kelly McQuain
(reviewed by Marc Frazier)
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain Bloom Books (March 2014) 42 pages reviewed by Marc Frazier This collection takes us on a journey back to our roots as individuals largely shaped by family. There are siblings here, parents, even a step-grandfather. Though the poet is gay, he is not slavishly bound to writing strictly from that […]
Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz
(from the preface by Samuel R. Delany)
by Vincent Czyz Rain Mountain Press (May 2015) 238 pages from the preface by Samuel R. Delany Like every one of the last three dozen MFA theses I’ve read, the following text is neither a novel nor, really, a collection of stand-alone stories. Familiar characters—Zirque (rhymes with Jerk), Blue Jean, the Duke of Pallucca—disappear or […]
On the Move with Neil Shepard’s Vermont Exit Ramps
(reviewed by Tony Whedon)
VERMONT EXIT RAMPS by Neil Shepard Big Table Publishing 50 pages reviewed by Tony Whedon Four decades ago Leo Marx defined the central conceit of the American pastoral as the steam locomotive breaking a nineteenth century forest’s silence. In his classic The Machine in the Garden Marx examined that figure’s significance to American literature as it chugged through […]
Style in John Galsworthy’s The Patrician
(reviewed by Carol Smallwood)
THE PATRICIAN by John Galsworthy Amazon Digital Services, Inc. 160 pages reviewed by Carol Smallwood Style is difficult to detect in your own writing, though it’s automatically sensed in others. The Patrician, a novel published in 1911, is the work I think of in connection with style because it fits so well Galsworthy’s definition of it […]
The Search for Conceptual Writing in Dworkin and Goldsmith’s Against Expression edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith
(reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz)
AGAINST EXPRESSION: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONCEPTUAL WRITING edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith Northwestern Univ. Press 656 pages reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz One of the curious cultural phenomena of our time is that radical epithets developed in the rather small audience for visual art acquire a prestige that makes them glibly applicable to arts […]
My Second Favorite Writer Just Died: Elmore Leonard, Philip K. Dick, and the Weird Justice of Genre
by Michael Ennis
Long flights and waiting rooms will never be the same. Elmore Leonard is my second favorite writer, but I didn’t mourn when he died. I counted. The tally of capers and crime sprees has become finite. For years, vacation has been a pretext for devouring Leonard’s novels, seeing how many I could get through while […]
