I’ve been remiss in re-posting the following. Sorry. I still blame the hurricane. Even for things I should have done prior to the hurricane.

At the honorable Bookslut, Micah McCrary reviews Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.

Boully, both a poet and an essayist by experience, knows perfectly well how to weave together the intricacies of chosen words and images with an arc essential to an impacting story, and the key to her prose here lies not in its darkness or its grownup-ness, but rather its careful tiptoeing between the minds and hearts of characters whose surfaces we’ve known for decades….

[T]o delve into Boully’s work is to dive with faith from the plank — to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself. One must, when reading the work, “dispel every other thought,” as Calvino would say. They must find themselves in a locked room, perhaps on a couch, perhaps in the bath (to dream of mer-creatures), or perhaps almost prostrate in bed with wide and absorbing eyes. They must be willing to fly themselves…. [Click here to read the full review]

At HTML Giant, Kristin Sanders also reviews not merely. Sanders discusses structure and hybridity (and all that good stuff), and her engagement is wholly intelligent and insightful throughout. “Perhaps most prominent are questions related to traditional gender roles and the budding sexuality of the story’s youth,” suggests Sanders, “which every other adaption appears to have dulled down.”

But it’s Sanders’ appreciation of the book’s humor, of course, that I particularly enjoy:

. . .  [not merely] offers more questions than answers. Who are the Lost Boys, really, and why are they clothed in bearsuits? What’s the history between Peter and Mrs. Darling?  How many other little girls did Peter whisk off to Neverland? How does one properly dispose of Never poo? About Tinkerbell, Boully wonders: “where ever will we get such small medical supplies for you? The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon.” . . . [Read the full review here.]

And Karen Hannah, at Open Letters Monthly, also reviews not merely. Though the review is less of a review and more of a dissertation. Hannah’s level of engagement is astonishing. It even makes me want to keep publishing.

Boully’s book subtly reveals how we engage in the act of creating narrative through our reading in order to find our own place within a narrative—in order to be placed within a narrative ourselves—in the same way that we place characters via our definition of them. This makes narrative a kind of place that we look to find ourselves within or that we try to settle ourselves within. We seek it out like a home because it feels familiar or because it began from the origins of something that felt familiar. [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Read more about the book at the following link, where you can also buy Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them for $2 off the Amazon price, along with free shipping.

Nick Sturm, at nothing less than The Rumpus, reviews Sarah Goldstein’s Fables.

‎Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision, the stories of Sarah Goldstein’s collection, Fables, awaken the tension between human and nonhuman in these haunting vignettes. . . . Entering Goldstein’s Fables is good fodder for dreams and the conscience, but be sure not to leave this one laying out for the kids. [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Also: In Digest Magazine‘s InDefinite Podcast Episode #22 features Ms. Goldstein reading from Fables.

Johannes Göransson’s entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is now featured at LitPub, where you can not only buy the book, but read excerpts and a review by Tim Jones-Yelvington .

Elsewhere, Fence poet and Capo of the Racine Public Library system, Nick Demske, provides a thought-provoking review of Entrance.

Göransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. He’s the Poet Laureate of the Coal Mine, our savior canary, dying and producing perpetually death-obsessed art that we might all be spared. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease.” [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Joseph Michael Owens, at PANK Magazine, also reviews Göransson’s Entrance.

‎Entrance to a colonial pageant… demands its reader to engage it on a close sentence-to-sentence level and rewards the reader with some truly spectacular prose. Prose that, page after page, begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child . . . before immolating the host, the reader. [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

For folks craving more and ever more Göransson, we direct you to this interview with Johannes, via SJ Fowler, at 3:AM Magazine, where you will also find more excerpts from entrance.