Barrelhouse Reviews: As If Fire Could Hide Us by Melanie Rae Thon
To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Feast by Ina Cariño
It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so their English reaches for oracular truths.
Barrelhouse Reviews: All the Wrong Places by Ruth Crossman
Crossman doesn’t want to put a bow on things--the fear of loss persists; it’s merely taken new shape.
Barrelhouse Reviews: I’m Never Fine by Joseph Lezza
The title of this collection of essays is as much an admission as a threat. Or rather, as much an explanation as an expiation.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Traces by Mairead Small Staid
As the book drew to a close, I was filled with the same satisfied fatigue as when leaving a vast museum.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Driftwood 2023 Anthology
So many author interviews start with “welcome to the pages of Driftwood.” New readers will feel the warmth of that welcome.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Phoenix Song by LD Green
Green’s “songs” communicate the possibility of finding pleasure and connection in a body previously dismissed as a myth.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Dreams Under Glass, by Anca Szilágyi
Anca Szilágyi’s second novel, Dreams Under Glass, explores a young artist’s ache to make meaning in a world that feels meaningless.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Belly to the Brutal, by Jennifer Givhan
Where does a mother’s body end and a child’s begin? Belly to the Brutal roots itself in that liminal space.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Doom Town by Gabriel Blackwell
This is a hard book, in multiple senses of the word. Hard like difficult, like indestructible, like painful, like merciless.
Barrelhouse Reviews: If This Were Fiction, by Jill Christman
An author, professor, and mother, Christman worries about many things, “but mostly,” she writes, “I worry about the physical safety of my kids. All the time.”
Barrelhouse Reviews: Panics, by Barbara Molinard, Translated by Emma Ramadan
The best story in Barbara Molinard's book Panics, and the one which establishes the thematic thread binding all the others together into a cohesive collection, is the author's own, which Marguerite Duras explains in the book’s preface.
Barrelhouse Reviews: It’s Not Nothing, by Courtney Denelle
For a debut novel, Courtney Denelle’s It’s Not Nothing embraces a remarkable degree of risk. Voice and a highly internal focus drive the fragmented narrative.
Barrelhouse Reviews: How to Adjust to the Dark, by Rebecca Van Laer
Early in Rebecca van Laer’s debut novella, our protagonist, Charlotte, states, “I have been wondering for a long time what to do about my poetry.”
Barrelhouse Reviews: L(eye)ght by Jessica Kim
In her new poetry chapbook L(eye)ght, Jessica Kim explores the power of the eye as it relates to the body and perceptions of identity.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Antique Densities by Jefferson Navicky
When books aren’t melodramatically losing ground to the digital realm, they’re beckoning us inside their logical leaps and syntactic slides in Jefferson Navicky’s defiant Antique Densities.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Tooth Box, by Jenny Irish
“Ten years from now I will think of Texas as the end of girlhood,” writes Jenny Irish in the closing poem of Tooth Box. This end encapsulates the constant question Irish asks the reader throughout the collection: where were you when everything changed?
Barrelhouse Reviews: One Person Holds So Much Silence, by David Greenspan
In David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence, a migration occurs in two dimensions.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Fact of Memory by Aaron Angello
ne of the challenges of writing about Aaron Angello’s The Fact of Memory is trying to categorize it. As the author explains in the introductory note, he tasked himself with writing a prose poem a day meditating on each word of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.”
Barrelhouse Reviews: Waiting for God by Vi Khi Nao
For Beckett fans, this play is as if his two tragicomic acts were squeezed into one. Indeed, there are Vladimir and Estragon equivalents—though they are now women named Eliquis and Abigatra—and there is a lifeless tree in the form of an x-ray machine.