Barrelhouse Reviews: Overstaying by Ariane Koch
Nothing here has value except her own doubled-down commitment to it—there’s a kind of nobility in deciding to hold onto the nothing that you have.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Stranger by Emily Hunt
What Hunt reveals is the strangeness of other people, and the way their agonies and compulsions are other to themselves, propelling them.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Chipped by José Vadi
How do we define the public? What activities should be allowed in public spaces? Who counts as the local community?
Barrelhouse Reviews: Failure to Comply by [sarah] Cavar
Failure To Comply is a manifesto of trans resilience, of choosing to live in an ungoverned body.
Barrelhouse Reviews: American Analects by Gary Young
In asking us to “believe in” clouds, this poem surrenders to both the changing nature of things and the instability of self, the ever-shifting interconnectedness of self with other.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage
With the finesse of a magician, Brundage unpacks, upends, and performs sleights of hand with words we have shoved into closets.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Another Word for Hunger by Heather Bartlett
The speaker doesn’t necessarily want her hunger, or maybe just doesn’t always feel comfortable always carrying it, stoking its fire.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
As hearing tests and various attempts at treatment consume her life, the narrator seems removed from time, set apart from it.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith
When I finished, I felt I had been washed clean, that I had sloughed off something old and heavy.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Attachments by Lucas Mann
If Mann’s intent in writing Attachments could be distilled into one phrase, fatherhood as multitude may fit.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Horse Show by Jess Bowers
How many horses are too many horses? Suddenly, I'm thinking about horses more than I ever have.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
How to escape? The collection’s ending offers a clue. The thing that saves her, the thing that gives her wings, is opening her eyes.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner
What becomes evident in Wagner’s collection is the bloody costs of our collective heritage, and how we pay those costs throughout the ages.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Now You Are a Missing Person by Susan Hayden
Oh, what we will do to be seen!
Barrelhouse Reviews: How We Were Before by Jonathan Kravetz
Kravetz’s gift is his ability to transcend the rawness of that ache and to suss out the nascent embers of an alternative New England.
Barrelhouse Reviews: A Rupture in the Interiors by Valerie Witte
Living in a human body is complex and nuanced. Acknowledging these subtleties is a way of embracing full existence, including life’s enigmas.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Gender/Fucking by Florence Ashley
They discuss the messiness and double standards that come from talking about gender, sexuality, and eroticism, especially in academic settings.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger
A sobering reminder that the mountain and the mosquito will be here long after we are gone.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Way Back by Russell Karrick
It seems the way back for Karrick is a matter of allowing for beauty in every moment, even in what he might initially find irritating or ugly.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Ardor by Alyse Knorr
An adventurous collection, filled with humor and optimism, Ardor is a future-thinking text.