Night Night, and Fuck You - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Night Night Fawn (One World 2026) by Jordy Rosenberg. Among many human beings it is customary—has been, for a long time, in all kinds of places—for the act of giving birth to convey upon t...

"Far from to forgive all, in this book, to understand all is precisely to entertain the loving and revolutionary imperative of non-forgiveness."

Sophie Lewis (@reproutopia.bsky.social) looks at Jordy Rosenberg's latest, NIGHT NIGHT FAWN, for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2026/03/24/n...

Memorial Wall - The Massachusetts Review A Review of J. Malcolm Garcia’s Alabama Village: Faith, Hope, and Survival in a Southern Town (Seven Stories, 2025) From the get-go, let it be clear: this will be a partisan review. Early on, during t...

#MassReviews "More than any other [memorial]—and more than enough—is Garcia’s simple commitment to seeing, hearing, and recording the people and history of a place that nearly everyone else has written off."

Jim Hicks reviews J. Malcolm Garcia's ALABAMA VILLAGE: massreview.org/2025/12/04/m...

A Review of Katharina Volckmer's Calls May Be Recorded - The Massachusetts Review Katharina Volckmer’s second novel, Calls May Be Recorded (Two Dollar Radio, 9/16/25) is a fierce workplace satire that is bold in its exacting focus on those pushed to the margins of this century’s ra...

"Perhaps, by hemming her protagonist in so tightly, Volckmer invites the reader to experience, on some level, a taste of Vanilla Travels Ltd.’s exhausting monotony."

Christopher Santantasio, on CALLS MAY BE RECORDED, for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/11/18/a...

World Building - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Reasons and Feelings by Sarah Mesle (University of Chicago Press) Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now is a new contribution to the University of Chicago Pres...

"This section defines REASONS AND FEELINGS itself quite brilliantly: it’s a book working to avail itself of a different style of the “guide to writing” genre to attempt to know the world differently."

Jon Hoel on Sarah Mesle, for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/10/28/w...

Pages That Sing - The Massachusetts Review What is poetry? What is voice? These are the questions that editors Philip Brady and Shanta Lee ask in Sign and Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, a wide-ranging new poetic anthology published ...

"All the poets in SIGN & BREATH create entanglements in which voices can be made more fully heard, visible, animated, complicated, and thus more grieveable... the very thing that makes us addressable."

Melissa Parrish, reviewing SIGN & BREATH: massreview.org/2025/10/23/p...

#MassReviews

Rally Your Habits: A Review of Brian Morton’s Writing as a Way of Life - The Massachusetts Review Brian Morton, known best for his novels Florence Gordon, Breakable You, and Starting Out in the Evening (the latter of which was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award), has turned his skill to a book...

"Multi-disciplinarity is certainly a mainstay of the book: filmmakers and songwriters have wisdom to lend to a life of writing[...]"

Jon Hoel looks at Brian Morton's use of artists and baseball in his WRITING AS A WAY OF LIFE for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/09/25/r...

Cover of Issa Quincy's Absence, featuring black text on an orange background with various photographs of still life

"Verses and images that travel in and reappear through
time and space are instructive signs for how the novel approaches language." Kanyin Ajayi looks at the language and story of Issa Quincy's ABSENCE for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/09/18/a...

Ten Poems Ten Years Later - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Eighteenth in Line to the Throne by James Tate (Press Brake 2025) Ten years have passed since the death of the poet James Tate, but in that time something remarkable has happened: already ...

"Each of these poems follows one of Tate’s familiar formulae: either something extraordinary or supernatural disturbs the realm of the ordinary or vice versa. . ."

Noah Hale looks at the new #JamesTate collection from Press Brake for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/09/09/t...

An Outermost Love Triangle - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Salt House by Hazel Hawthorne An early twentieth-century literary darling of the Outer Cape (and a descendent of Nathaniel Hawthorne), Hazel Hawthorne and her second husband, Morris S. Wer...

"In Salt House, narrative grows out of the natural landscape, which Hawthorne takes great care to detail, in indulgent, Woolfian passages..."
Hana Rivers dives into the recently reissued "Salt House" by Hazel Hawthorne for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/08/14/a...

Reframing the Scholar - The Massachusetts Review A Review of On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies by Jennifer Nelson’s “Surrect” has been used twice in English. Once in 1692 by Leonard Plukenet, the English botanist, in a letter to John R...

"So often we describe the academic in opposition to labor, but Nelson’s collection is candid about university structures."

@asaldrake.bsky.social looks at Jennifer Nelson's ON THE WAY TO THE PAINTINGS OF FOREST ROBBERIES for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/06/24/r...

Where Does It Lead? A Review of Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania - The Massachusetts Review Like the title of this collection of short stories suggests, Portalmania obsesses over portals, bothas metaphor for transformation and as a phenomenological entity. Urbanski stretches thisfascination ...

"Taken together, the protagonists of these stories express, in their own unique ways, the
uncomfortableness of being perceived."

Managing Editor Edward Clifford looks at Debbie Urbanski's PORTALMANIA for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/06/03/w...

The Medical Myths of State Violence - The Massachusetts Review Across twelve chapters, Beliso-De Jesús presents the history of medicalized state-sanctioned violence via excited delirium syndrome through a compelling combination of historiography, ethnography, and...

"At the heart of Excited Delirium is a direct challenge to medicalized narratives that both prime Black people for premature death and scientifically blame them for dying."

Kevin Morris reviews @beliso-dejesus.bsky.social's latest book for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/05/20/t...

We Are What We Create - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author “Creation flows both ways” remarks Ankara, the robot and author of the novel embedded within Nnedi Okorafor’s latest speculative masterpiece, Death of ...

"Much of Okorafor’s work grapples with race and difference and the slippage between storytelling and reality making."

Chloe Hunt looks at @nnedi.bsky.social's latest novel DEATH OF THE AUTHOR for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/04/10/w...

“I understand now”: Aria Aber’s Good Girl and Maternal Recognition - The Massachusetts Review Book Review A Review of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (Hogarth 2025) “I wanted to take pictures, I thought, because exile made my parents’ lives a mystery to me. I wanted to archive my life, to have irrefutable testimony...

"Nila’s impulse to photograph—to capture what is present, to make it tangible instead of ephemeral—arises out of a desire to document what is most unknowable to her"

Vika Mujumdar reviews Aria Aber's GOOD GIRL for #MassReviews:

"The thing about a Tai or a Heather is we don’t tolerate a lot of being pushed around by the world."

Heather Jones(heatherjones.bsky.social) looks at @jendireiter.bsky.social's ORIGIN STORY for #MassReviews: themassachusettsreview.substack.com/p/poison-cur...

Check out Christos Kalli's review of Joseph Fasano's THE LAST SONG OF THE WORLD for #MassReviews #BOAeditions: massreview.org/node/12237

"So, if nothing is permanent, then what’s important? the novel seems to ask. What truly endures?"
UMass MFA student and writer Maya Gulieva looks at Ayşegül Savaş’s THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS for #MassReviews: massreview.org/node/12179