Author: Guest Reviewer

Review: GHOST/LANDSCAPE by Kristina Marie Darling & John Gallaher
|

Review: GHOST/LANDSCAPE by Kristina Marie Darling & John Gallaher

ByGuest Reviewer

In the collaborative poetry collection Ghost/Landscape (Blazevox, 2016) by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher there is no beginning or end. The first poem is “Chapter Two.” So begins traversing a time loop of poems where the reader can really “begin” anywhere. What is a beginning and what is an ending? Is moving forward and looking behind you the same thing? A circle never ends. “Chapter Two,” begins like a bed time story:

“We must have known there was no going back…that morning, before our windows had been broken, you asked about the lock on the door. I realized it was only a matter of time before the alarm sounded, which always seemed out of place in the dead of winter.”

Review: LABOR OF LOVE: THE INVENTION OF DATING by Moira Weigel
|

Review: LABOR OF LOVE: THE INVENTION OF DATING by Moira Weigel

ByGuest Reviewer

Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating Moira Weigel Farrar, Strass and Giroux, 2016 304 pp; $26 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Andrew McKernan What are you doing tonight? We should Netflix and chill. Even without receiving that exact text, one knows the purpose, and the posture. Why those words, that pitched, disinterested tone?…

Review: SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN, YOU’LL SEE by Christos Ikonomou
|

Review: SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN, YOU’LL SEE by Christos Ikonomou

ByGuest Reviewer

Though Ikonomou’s characters are faced with Greece’s economic crisis, and the collection is beholden to particular circumstance, place, and time, Something Will Happen is not so particular as to be prohibitive. It’s spare. It’s intricate, full of heart and heft, and about the crisis only insofar as it enters the lives of these men and women, their dreams and thoughts, their relationships and homes.

Review: SAD GIRL POEMS by Christopher Soto
|

Review: SAD GIRL POEMS by Christopher Soto

ByGuest Reviewer

This collection’s jacked up heart beats in its final piece, “Hatred of Happiness.” “Hatred of Happiness” rejects and buries practically every trope proposed by the mainstream LGBTQ movement. Gone are the banners calling for marriage equality and positive representations of gay life. Gone is the assertion that “we are just like you.”

Review: THE MEASURE OF DARKNESS by Liam Durcan
|

Review: THE MEASURE OF DARKNESS by Liam Durcan

ByGuest Reviewer

It is this sort of layered questioning early in the novel where The Measure of Darkness is at its strongest and most emotionally resonant—who are you if the very skill that has been your reason for existence has been taken from you? And on a secondary level, what it is like to rationally know that your own perceptions and the basis for your own experience can no longer be trusted—to be told of, but to not actually experience the ways in which your perception is flawed?