Issue 21 Preview: One Hundred Forty, by Samantha Rich
When Katya interviewed for the job at the cloning project station, they gave her a tour of the facility.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Drakkar Noir, by Michael Chang
It’s easy to become lost in these poems, watching as Chang layers alienation and longing with humor and insults; a quick taunt, a fierce left hook. Each flash of tenderness is beautiful and hard-won.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Your Crib, My Quibla, by Saddiq Dzukogi
The entire section is a holy conversation within this one poet’s self. It charts a movement through grief, from fragmentation to connection.
Barrelhouse Reviews: The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser
In her struggle to find words, Almontaser has created a new language. In it, Shaytan and Power Rangers exist in the same line.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Horror Vacui, by Shy Watson
Watson manages to create poems with speakers who feel detached and involved in equal measures, thereby capturing the feeling that everything and nothing are happening all the time.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Studies of Familiar Birds, by Carrie Green
The stanzas are radiant, seeming capable of flight; unsentimental, yet stirring. Upon finishing the last page of Studies of Familiar Birds, my conclusion was that we needed more poems about bird nests.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, by Lannie Stabile
Built to blast holes in the unwarranted hero worship by a surprising number of men of the Greek god Zeus, Stabile’s collection of 39 devastating poems chronicles the long aftermath of sexual assault.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Love Letters to the Revolution, by Angelique Zobitz
These poems center on the experience of Black girlhood to motherhood in direct, taut language and demonstrate Zobitz’s strong formal range.
Barrelhouse Reviews: A Gospel of Bones, by Suzi Q. Smith
Smith demonstrates that the gospel can be used to deliver anger.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Winter in Sokcho, by Elisa Shua Dusapin
We are given no expectation that this young woman’s life, with seemingly so few opportunities for happiness, will turn out well. Nor does she seem to care.
Barrelhouse Reviews: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura
At times it was frustrating to watch her fall into the same traps of getting too involved in her work. Nobody can conjure businesses from thin air! You’re going to burn out all over again! I would yell at her.
Barrelhouse Reviews: How to Survive a Human Attack, by K. E. Flann
Certainly, we could all use some strategies to avoid a portion of the human population actively trying to murder us.
Barrelhouse Reviews: White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
White Magic emerges as a collection that is not as much a “working through” as it is a “working with,” sifting through the fictions that shape, maim, and at times save us.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Sister Seance, by Aimee Parkinson
Here, flash fiction virtuoso Aimee Parkison returns to the novel form, her first in seven years.
Barrelhouse Reviews: We Imagined It Was Rain, by Andrew Siegrist
Water is always rising in Andrew Siegrist’s Tennessee. It builds and builds until, finally, it floods.
Barrelhouse Reviews: Sisyphusina, by Shira Dentz
For a poetry collection with the theme of female aging, could there be any form more apt than a hybrid collection?
Zero, Zero, Zero, by Marah Blake
Taxi declares its central tension in the first eight minutes of the pilot episode: making a life for yourself while the life you want is out of reach. It’s big dreams and found family and disappointments that land just shy of melancholy. It’s about finding a way forward despite how stuck you really are.
Proper Action, by Treena Thibodeax
“Attention. This is a lockdown.” Over the loudspeaker, the principal sounds like she’s chewing something she didn’t have time to swallow. “Take proper action.”
Barrelhouse Reviews: What Falls Away is Always, Edited by Katharine Haake and Gail Wronsky
Members of the Los Angeles Glass Table Collective consider the topic “late-stage writing” in the essay collection What Falls Away is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing & Death.