Reviews + Interviews

Polly Atkin’s The Company of Owls explores the hauntingly beautiful and brutally honest lives of the wild owls living in England as well as Polly’s personal experience with Ehlers Danlos syndrome. Using her memories to build a bridge between nature and wellness, Polly shows us how living amongst the owls has helped shape her life […]

In “Valiant,” inside “Driving Emergencies,” a car is stopped. The scene takes eleven words: “Roared orders, lights / pulled up beside us. / Our chances look terrible.” The poem does not slow down to explain why the chances look terrible. It accelerates — “after the first / warning shot telling me / it wasn’t about […]

Gerard Robledo Texas Review Press 2025 37 pgs. $16.95 Book Review “Your feet flat keeping time / against my belly pushing me up / until I open like an umbrella.” And so begins Gerard Robledo’s debut chapbook, My Mother, The Butcher, a work whose title and cover is brutally honest though exquisitely rendered, refreshingly vulnerable […]

In Eject City, we enter a fragmented world of pain and grief, bottled up for years. Unlike fine wine, pain and grief simmer in the darkness of unsettled family histories that refuse to stay buried, a monster that needs to rage before it is set free from its crypt. Morphew is not afraid to dig […]

The world that we’ve created for ourselves is utterly radical. A house is radical. Moving spaces is radical. Movement is radical. But under the shadow of normalization, we don’t always notice just how radical they are. In his writings, Genpei Akasegawa disrupts this normalized understanding. In Matt Fargo’s English translation of Akasegawa’s short story collection […]

Indeed “the problem of art is a problem of translations,” says Pablo Palacio in his book A Man Brought to Gallows, translated to English by Paula Riofrío (p. 30). Interpretations are what form the imagination in this first edition short story that traipses surreal metaphors to bold depictions of our fractured society.  Andrés, the narrator, […]

Walid Sadek, an artist and writer who works on post-war Lebanese society, writes of the figure of the “nonposthumous survivor” as one who carries the burden of unnecessary memory, whose testimony is a challenge to post-conflict normalcy and peacebuilding. During this period of mass psychosis, those disappeared or illegally abducted, come to occupy a liminal […]

Téa Franco’s debut short story collection, You Could Be That Kind of Girl, contains twenty-one fascinating stories that explore the ways in which Latina, primarily Borica, girls of all ages and backgrounds navigate the rough terrain of diet culture, Eurocentric beauty standards, white feminism, and American capitalism. The collection’s protagonists range from a teenage vampire […]

Rob Macaisa Colgate, poet and playwright, recently released My Love is Water, an experimental verse drama dealing with heartbreak and hauntings. The Filipinx and bakla protagonist, Danilo, disrupts the stage and page with their schizophrenia and longing, conversing in American Taglish and meandering through a house party as they strive to get over a ghostly […]

(orignally published by Sage Cigarettes) jade vine’s unsent texts pile up like repressed memories–the self-proclaimed poet and gender vandalist describing absence as an overgrown plant taking root in its throat, framing desire as a horrific monster. Admitting that “i’m most afraid when no one’s touching me or thinking of touching me” (75), these one-line messages […]

In the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” expanded the envelope of speculative horror—and prompted hundreds of readers to cancel their subscriptions. Letters and postcards poured in with subscribers offering their complaints and reasons, nearly all of them with an undercurrent of outrage at the supernatural events being […]

One thing a reader is struck by in this sequence of poems, divided into sections, is how well each poem stands on its own. This book is about a mother, a daughter, a family, and a mother-daughter bond, bears, like other good books, the stamp of necessity. What sets it apart is particulars, its individuality, […]

“Lived and died a fat seven inches from your closet / toe. The gray heads of rainwater blown in. I / fought my own omens, their circles” (Moore 1). And so begins Iva Moore’s debut chapbook, Women Collapse into Better, Brighter Artists, a work that deftly examines gendered identity and relationships, womanhood as an inherently […]

(Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 46 pages, 2022, hand-sewn chapbook) Far Cry, by Tom Daley, is a tribute to a friend passed and a searing elegy of a friendship lost. Daley writes in the Author’s Note that Far Cry is addressed to an estranged companion, Phil Herbert, who passed away unexpectedly in 2020. Though we […]