ARCHIVE OF BOOKS RECEIVED
 BUT NOT REVIEWED AND SHORT CUTS
   

100 JOLTS: shockingly short stories 
by Michael A. Arnzen
A fascinating compendium of twisted, surreal, and horror-laden shorts (mostly ultra-flash), Arnzen’s 100 JOLTS is mad and worthwhile—though just a hair too steeped in the horror genre for us to review fully and/or comfortably. (We are not in a rush to reinforce that popular misconception about ALR and the meaning of “surreal.”)

Are You Ever Going to be Thin? (and other stories) 
by Jennifer Semple Siegel
Fine, though it did not produce any rich and creamy lather (but then that’s just us).

Sarbola 
by John Beowulf
Grad students, microbiology, super-viruses. Beowulf shows promise.

Epiphanies on the Promenade: Selected Poems 
by Robert Prochaska
Solid and successful American free verse. Prochaska alternates between spare and orgiastic language to significant effect.

Blood Electric  
by Kenji Siratori 
Occasionally interesting at the sentence level (mostly in the areas of surreal rhythm and image), this self-styled “cyberpunk classic” is at its core a semantic wasteland. Authors who eschew meaning casually or intentionally do so at their own risk (and most often to the reader’s detriment).

Music of a Proto-Suicide  
by Catherynne M. Valente
Valente’s poetry gleams and churns in this slim chapbook. Intense, visceral, bursting with image.

O, Vozque Pulp  
by Carlos M. Luis and Derek White 
An abstractly illustrated series of disconnected narratives (flash fiction and prose poetry). The marriage of Luis’s line and wash images with White’s meandering words generates interest of a random and pastiche sort.

Vagabond Zoo 
by Nicholas Mistretta
Well-written and interesting but too much a travelogue for us to review at length.

The Baltimore Years 
by J. Tyler Blue
No Comment.

Ring of Fire and other stories 
by Tanyo Ravicz
Readable story collection, but abysmally designed. 

Lion of the Balkans 
by Vladimir Chernozemsky
No comment.

Mehetebelly’s Flesh Hell, an audionovel (CD format)
by Kirsten Imani Kasai
We do not review CDs or electronic media of any kind. Looks tough though.

A Dirge for the Temporal 
by Darren Speegle 
We don’t review horror.

The Labyrinth  
by Catherynne M. Valente
Extended work of prose poetry in essence. Often brilliant but too relentlessly obscure and personal to succeed as long form prose. Extremely palatable when approached a few pages at a time. If Valente ever manages to calm down a bit, she might turn out to be a historically great prose writer.

Last Chap
poems by Jonathan Penton
Some nice work, but a bit uneven.

In Time to Tango 
by Arden Tice and Nichols Sands
The Vietnam-Era material works best in this poetry collection; the rest is hit and miss. Three knuckle raps for horrible text design.

Bedford 
by Pat Lawrence
No comment.

The Human War 
by Noah Cicero
Noah Cicero shows some promise as a plain-speech grunt Zen poet (his statement of the obvious is quite unique in its forthrightness), but this novella/story collection was a bit cliché in its angst.   

Going to Dolpo 
by Timothy Doyle
Nicely put together but too travelogue-y for us to review.

Regionrat 
by Richard Laskowski
No comment.

Now and Again:
The Ecstatic Doggerel of Samuel Beast
Interesting artwork, and both prose and poetry seem to show a hint of profundity, but the doggerel undercurrent is too irritating to bear.

Kick 
by J. Todd Wilson
Another victim of Publish America’s ridiculous vanity business plan. At $24.95 softcover, why bother?

Spiritual Turkey Beggar Baste Mechanism/Trapezoidal Juggernaut: a chapbook 
by Sandy Baldwin/Derek White

No comment.

The Judgment of Christ  
by James Joseph Cook
Contains some interesting writing, but it’s difficult (probably impossible) to employ characters like Lucifer, Azazel, Christ and Muhammed in anything but satire and not come off as overly broad and self-righteous. Such tales of moral conflict are better pitched with subtlety and symbolism.   

Blood Oranges a chapbook 
by Amanda Charlotte Earl
Short imagistic poetry. Nice and sensuous.

Just So’s You Know, 
chapbook,  a Univ. of Ottawa Anthology
Promising poems, though a bit terse for our tastes.

A Continent Adrift  
by Vladimir Chernonzemsky
No comment.