For our Fall 2014 issue, we decided to start accepting reviews, and we think our magazine is stronger for it. Take a look at these reviews, then pick up their respective titles and enjoy! (If you have a book or collection of poems that you think would be good for us to review, or if you want to send us a review you’ve written, contact us at neatmag@gmail.com.)

Fall 2014

Tomorrowland by Joseph Bates (Review by Magdalena Waz)
“To call Joseph Bates’ debut story collection, Tomorrowland, strange would be doing it a disservice. Yes, it’s weird in all of the ways that genre-bending fiction is (cities built in the small square of a backyard, a television that can access multiple universes), but underneath the conceits is a deep pool of human feeling, which only the best weird writing knows how to dive into.” 

Honeyvoiced by Jordi Alonso (Review by Brenna York)
“[Alonso] fills in the gaps of Sappho’s fragments with his own writing. Gaps which create pause and mystery in the ancient greek poet’s work. The many devotees of Sappho’s poems enjoy the plaintive stare of those gaps. Alonso’s project of interweaving his and her sentiments heads out onto another experience, one that backgrounds the original material. To read Honeyvoiced is not to read Sappho, but to experience work deeply inspired by her.”

Fall Love by Anne Whitehouse (Review by Jennifer Finstrom)
“The idea of what it means to be an artist is a theme impels the action throughout the novel and that is returned to again and again in different ways. I found myself as curious to know what the last thoughts on this would be—what final takeaway we would be given—just as I was curious to know where the novel’s end would leave the characters themselves.”

Winter 2014 – 2015

Border States by Jane Hoogestraat (Review by Emily Corwin)
“These are poems of patience, waiting, and reflection—poems that sit watchful at the window and drive empty roads across country (much like the cover image of the book).  Wistful and contemplative, Hoogestraat’s writing takes us to the solitary edges—of border towns, time zones, seasons, and memory, where “the mind walks the edge of a cold field”, where people “who know the land well prefer to walk the edges alone”.  Hoogestraat’s poems occupy the spaces that are liminal, where the edges meet and where the self intersects with geographical and cultural landscapes. “