Vincent Czyz

Book Review: Little Lamb, Who Tried to Kill Thee? — Exploring the Story of Abraham and Isaac

March 19, 2014
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In the superb “But where is the lamb?,” James Goodman takes up the numerous ramifications, moral and otherwise, of God’s chilling command to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham’s — perhaps more chilling — acquiescence.

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Book Review: “Heat” — An Imaginatively Imaginary Interview with Actress Jean Seberg

December 28, 2013
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“Heat” is a fictional interview in which Dickinson asks uncomfortably intimate questions and then imagines the answers Seberg might have given.

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Poetry Review: Travel Down “The Golden Road”

June 5, 2013
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Rachel Hadas’ poems present deceptively calm surfaces, like a lake that hides its rich inner life beneath bright reflections of clouds and blue sky.

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Poetry Review: The Lyrical Restraint of Mel Kenne’s “Take”

July 11, 2012
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Poet Mel Kenne, like a desert ascetic, has pared away everything that is not essential -— no words have been wasted in the making of this collection.

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Music/Poetry Review: “Letters to Distant Cities” — An Appetite for the Forlorn

April 4, 2012
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The strength of the poetry is the ambiance it creates. Narrative is almost totally submerged in imagery, which may seem natural enough in verse but often is not the case.

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Book Commentary: Hooked on Phonics? — A Brief Reply to Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”

March 9, 2012
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While sound is certainly important, and language in the proper hands has its own music, syllabic harmonies need not be trumpeted as though they were the foundation of good prose.

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Fiction Review: “So There!” — Nicole Louise Reid’s Poetic Chick Lit

February 28, 2012
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“So There!” comes off as a poetic species of chick lit, its female characters desperate to break deadly dull routines, longing for more (not even sure what), but generally expecting the doorway to redemption —- a passage figuratively filled with light in their imaginations -— to be a man.

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Poetry Review: Daniel Borzutzky — Killing From Too Great A Distance

August 12, 2011
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There is no question that somewhere in this collection poet Daniel Borztuzky is drawing a parallel between bureaucrats and terrorists, between politicians and increasingly dehumanized societies—both in America and abroad—but the connections are like underground cables: I can only guess at where I might dig to uncover them.

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Book Review: A Brilliantly Phantasmagorical “Calendar of Regrets”

January 17, 2011
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A novel of echoes, reflections (sometimes inverted), and criss-crossing lines, Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets locates nodes of intersection, spotlights the forgotten, and magnifies the unnoticed. Calendar of Regrets by Lance Olsen. Fiction Collective, 456 pages, $22. By Vincent Czyz Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets had me from the opening scene: a vividly imagined and…

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Lyrical Hyperdrive

October 8, 2005
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In a new collection of his poetry, Albert Goldbarth supplies a marvelous mosaic of images, quantum leaps of intuition, and artifacts of historical anecdotes.

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