Formulaic poetry seems to be simultaneously under- and overrated, something force-fed us by teachers and then never seen again — as though only the archaic men of our textbooks were allowed to use the respective forms. Truthfully, formulaic poems have never actually left the literary milieu. In A Playbill For Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), […]
Book reviews
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Book Review: ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’ by Xochitl Gonzalez
The fact that Aubrey Plaza will play the main character in an upcoming Hulu adaptation of Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming is the least interesting thing about the book. Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron Books) is everything a novel should be and more. In 369 pages, Gonzalez subjects us to curiosity, heartbreak, lust, intrigue […]
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Book Review: ‘Liminal: Shadow Agent’ Parts 1 & 2, by Jon Cone
In the letter that author Jon Cone sent along with the first two volumes of his Liminal: Shadow Agent project (Greying Ghost), he calls the slim books “comic book scripts.” They are, in a sense. They tell a pictureless story of a superhero entering a fight against a great evil. The dialogue is called out […]
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Book Review: ‘The Long Corner’ by Alexander Maksik
Alexander Maksik Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m., Prairie Lights Bookstore, Free Alexander Maksik’s new novel The Long Corner (Europa Editions) — out May 17, the fourth release from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad — skillfully explores the intersections of capitalism and dictatorship, cliché and originality, art and life. By the end, the […]
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Book Review: ‘Bach and the Blues’ by Gary Kelley
Waterloo Cedar Falls Symphony: Between Bach and the Blues GBPAC Great Hall, Cedar Falls, Thursday, May 26 at 7 p.m., $6.75-55.75 The third week of November, 1936. Thanks to a brief story on National Public Radio, illustrator Gary Kelley learned the odd synchronicity of that moment, and decided to spin it into a graphic novel, […]
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Des Moines’ Mary Kline-Misol offers a meditation on the Earth
“How is it possible that the most intellectual creature to ever walk the planet Earth is destroying its only home?” —Dame Jane Morris Goodall, primatologist and anthropologist The arts often provide songs of the soul, expressions of inner muses. Visceral responses become the first dominos in a reactionary chain triggered by the intersections of artist […]
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Book Review: ‘Sort of Super’ by Eric Gapstur
He had to have known it was coming. There is no way that a competent publicist didn’t prepare Eric Gapstur for the eventuality that his graphic novel about 11-year-old Wyatt Flynn and his family coming to terms with his newly acquired superpowers in the wake of his mother’s disappearance would draw comparisons to the Netflix […]
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Book Review: ‘Monarch’ by Candice Wuehle
Jessica is an ex-child pageant queen with an awful memory. In fact, she can’t remember her childhood nearly at all outside of the pageants she participated in. The daughter of Dr. Clink, chair of the Boredom Studies department at a nameless Midwestern university, and Grethe Clink, a Norwegian beauty who hosts not-quite-Tupperware parties, Jessica has […]
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Book Review: ‘The Soul of the Family Tree’ by Lori Erickson
One morning, in a fling of middle-age thrill-seeking, Lori Erickson filled a small glass vial with her spittle and mailed it to AncestryDNA. Given that Erickson’s last name is Erickson and that she hails from Decorah, Iowa, arguably the most Norwegian-American small town on the continent, the results of the DNA testing were not surprising: […]
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Book Review: ‘This American House’ by Jason Loper and Michael Schreiber
As a woman in her mid-20s who has dedicated her life to the arts, owning any sort of house feels like a fantasy, much less one with as much historical significance as the Meier House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Monona, Iowa. But even for a person who doesn’t know much about architecture or […]
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Book Review: ‘The Family Chao’ by Lan Samantha Chang
Family can be a tricky balancing act. Lan Samantha Chang, in her newest novel, gives the central family the surname Chao, making them collectively, of course, the Chaos. There are a couple of sections early in the book where she really locks the reader into what seems like an obvious analogy: “‘We Chaos, who are […]
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Book Review: ‘Memento Vivere’ by Laura Johnson
In Memento Vivere (Cabin Bear Books), a tiny volume of rebellion against death, Cedar Rapids poet Laura Johnson creates a still life of delights and damages reminding both herself and the reader: Remember you must live. (For those missing the reference, “memento mori” is a commonly used phrase meaning “remember you must die.”) In the […]
