What I Learned: Michelle Tea

It hit me in that moment. I felt broke. I was broke. That was already a big sign my plan was caving in, even if I didn’t know it yet. Standing there emoting brokeness. I gravitated toward the window where at least the light from the city was still vibrating at a frequency I could enjoy, and there in the corner tucked out of the way was maybe the only thing that could have appealed to me in that moment: the local shelf. And on it, glowing like possibility, was a signed copy of semi-local Michelle Tea’s Valencia...

#Invert, Critical Reflections on Geraldine Snell’s overlove.

Written as a series of unsent love-letters to a lanky drummer boy named Curt, Geraldine Snell’s overlove is, as the cover blurb suggests, “a non-fiction novella concerned with love, boundaries, leaky jars and the female gaze.” It is also a portrait of a young artistic intellectual in the throws of limerence, the state of being …

Review – The New Make-Believe

When I picked up Judson Hamilton’s The New Make-Believe, I was anticipating a poetry of action. For me, the title conjured some potential blend of childhood idealism and a philosophy of escape, perhaps something like collective hallucination harnessed for political gains, a dream engine capable of producing, well, The New. I came looking for change, …

Relay – Foragers

Foragers by Jaime Fountaine, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. Foragers catches a broken moment in time when Mom’s new maybe-boyfriend, Jeff, cooks a ‘family’ dinner. It’s a ritual ceremony where the ingredients are quite toxic, and I’m not talking about the wild mushrooms. There’s a lesson waiting right in the middle for the narrator, whose anger is …

Relay – The Station

The Station by Terence Hannum, via Queen Mob's Teahouse, is a contemporary riff on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's classic Roadside Picnic. Time and reality vibrate uncertainly as a security guard protects a ruined and toxic shopping plaza on the Gulf Coast. Everything, including the narrator's life, is waste. Worth it for details that are well …

Review – A Furious Oyster

A Furious Oyster by Jessica Sequeira is an odd book about people who come back from the dead during storms, leaving ghostly remnants in the rain data which can be recorded, interpreted, and published. Well, that’s its setup at least. Although you might expect such a premise to deliver a horror story, what Sequeira gives …

Ionic@Blog

There is a tunnel through the air / It leads quite wondrously here and there / I've waited, watching what comes out / My eyes filled with everywhere / So now I turn and find what's near / To toss back through the information spout