Book Reviews Archive

Review: MONSTER TREK: THE OBSESSIVE SEARCH FOR BIGFOOT by Joe Gisondi

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Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot Joe Gisondi University of Nebraska Press, February 1 2016 306 pp, $18.95 Buy: paperback | nook | Kindle  “Bigfoot are reported across all social, educational, and economic classes,” writes journalist and professor Joe Gisondi in his new book Monster Trek: The Obsessive

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Mia You’s “A Solar Visor And A Song To Sing, Preliminary materials for reunification”

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As a result of several wars fought by the United States, North and South Korea have been divided since the mid-20th century. A further division was implemented through the creation of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which, in an epigraph to Mia You’s piece, is noted as a contemporary “viable

Review: THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth

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The Wake Paul Kingsnorth Graywolf, Sept 2015 365pp, $16 Buy: paperback Much has been made of Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, crowdfunded to publication in England last spring and longlisted for the Man Booker Award. Set during and after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, The Wake follows a

Review: TESTAMENT by G.C. Waldrep

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Testament G.C. Waldrep BOA Editions, 2015 144 pp, $16 Buy: paperback | Kindle | Nook An endnote to G. C. Waldrep’s excellent new book-length poem points out that it “originated as a exploration of and response to three texts,” Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (2009), Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise

In Bookstores Near You

  In her latest novel, Silence & Song, Melanie Rae Thon once again wanders into the world of devastation. The opening clip captures a fiery car accident, one that could have been avoided if only the father, the driver, had agreed to stop at a hotel for the night

NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA: Journey to the Center of an American Document

This is the start of a monthly journey through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. I’ve loved this book for many years. It’s scholarly and luminous, unfolding a rich lexicon. Open its pages and whole rivers, chunks of amethyst, living birds, and secret mammoth skeletons tumble forth.

Review: THE PITTSBURGH ANTHOLOGY Edited by Eric Boyd

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The Pittsburgh Anthology Ed. Eric Boyd Belt Books, September 2015 236 pp; $20 Buy paperback “Pittsburgh has always been a scrappy city, characterized by unflapping tenacity, even as outsourcing and the ills of globalization threatened its survival,” writes Kevin Tasker in “Rebirth of the Hollywood Lanes,” one of the

Angela Carter’s “Unicorn” and the Illusion of Empowerment Through Objectification

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“Q. What have unicorns and virgins got in common A. They are both fabulous beasts.” In the new collection of Angela Carter’s mostly forgotten, but viscerally affecting poetry, Carter perverts mythological symbols in order to subvert the mythology of femininity. Just as Simone De Beauvoir lamented that “one is not

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “I’m Not a Racist”

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Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “I’m Not a Racist,” published in One Throne Magazine, is an all-too-relevant rendering of “fair and balanced” evil. The poem, organized in couplets and single-standing lines, presents a mash-up of thoughts from a speaker who claims “I’m not a racist / I’m a realist,” in order

“What is the name of this monster? Poetry….”

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  In his excellent zombie novel, Zone One, Colson Whitehead writes: “We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” This sentence encapsulates one of the novel’s themes, but it can also be applied to a current trend in poetry which brings monsters to the