To say that the often experimental stories in Amy Stuber’s “Sad Grownups” are clever, funny, and intelligently designed is accurate, but experimentation can give way to gimmickry, wittiness to cattiness, and none of that happens here.
(reviews)
Tag: Reviews
The poet writes of boxes, or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her prose poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb meaning “to flaunt” in her own code of language.
(reviews)
Rarely do we see the history of the Revolutionary War and Founding era considered in the context of Midwestern history. Most commonly, this time period’s impact on the Midwest is simply ignored…
(reviews)
Cris Mazza’s ruminations, on full display, are provocative and frequently resonant of the shared problems we women must reckon with. She challenges us to refuse to be victims, she confides a hundred petty aversions it’s satisfying to recognize.
(reviews)
“Death and” is ultimately an epic fable about the relationship between its autobiographical speaker and the figure of Death as the speaker navigates plague, loss, precarious labor (sexual, manual, gig economy), and trans experience.
Nothing is so dangerous as a news report wherein Palestinians die in the passive voice, the horrific violence massaged into meaningless oblivion, the perpetrators somehow irrelevant.
Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
Hawk is an everyman, a representative of everyone human. And—like Christian in John Bunyan’s moral allegory A Pilgrim’s Progress, like Dante in The Divine Comedy—Hawk is on a journey to the Godhead.
Thirty-four houses in thirty-four years, as if the idea of putting down roots was anathema to her.
(reviews)
Show me a mistake that isn’t avoidable or a person who never makes one. How much easier these characters’ lives would be if they allowed themselves to fail and learn and grow.
(reviews)
