Fiction Review: Hoaxes and Other Stories

Hoaxes and Other Stories by Brian Dinuzzo. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 161 pages. $17.95, paperback.

​Right away, this book pulled me in. The titular Hoax, the leading story of the collection by Dinuzzo, is about a budding actor who keeps dying, found the victim of a number of terrible accidents, though each one reported to the news is fake—a hoax. The rest of the stories in the collection do a similarly excellent job of grabbing me immediately, drawing me into the folds with fascinating scenarios and interesting characters. If you’re like me—a chronic lover of weird stories—this collection is for you. Dinuzzo expertly crafts these strange situations and makes each one a treat to read.

​These strange stories are, of course, held up on the backs of Dinuzzo’s wonderful characters. Grandpa Charlie of The Undeniable Proof of the Bigfoot comes to mind as one expertly rendered example: an explosive storyteller and grizzled hunter of the cryptid of legend, unwilling to let go of his first encounter with his mark, obsessed with unearthing the secret magics of his unexplained world, even as it cuts him off from his community. This wonderful pairing of situation and character are what make Hoaxes and Other Stories such a wonderful read for the individual who seeks strangeness with a heartwarming humanity at its center.

—Sydney Anderson, MAR

Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia

Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th. 

Remi Recchia

Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living Room”describe a singular experience with breathtaking emotion: “The hardwood floor/reflects my new watch, large/face swallowing wrist:/a reminder that I am a man.” In other poems, Recchia conveys beautiful intimacy in carefully crafted words, like his poem “Fire Eater, Premolar, Bones,”: “Sometimes when we kiss, I feel your teeth/clink against mine: the quietest champagne/toast. We are not embarrassed anymore when this happens.” His book, Quicksand/Stargazing, a must-read, questions what it means to be a human/animal. 

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021). His chapbook, Sober, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks. He lives in Stillwater with his wife.

(biographical information courtesy of https://winningwriters.com/people/remi-recchia)

Roseanna Alice Recchia

Roseanna Alice Recchia’s work rings with voice and power. She has a mastery of image that pervades in every line. In “Bones I Get From My Mother,” Recchia describes: “I know my tongue/is a rounded wasp’s nest/with an egg’s gold finish./Everything inside is humming.” Delicate imagery overlaps with powerful messages, while messages can also be found in every well-crafted line. In another poem, “On Being Fat-Shamed While Out with Your Conventionally Attractive Boyfriend,” Recchia delivers a powerful voice by using a simple situation of ordering food at a restaurant. She writes: “This is just one way of practicing grace,/my mother says—people mostly/mean well and are doing their best/and don’t realize how they sound./I try to play that game too.” Recchia work resounds with a vast array of readers. Check out her poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, and her chapbook, Imitating Light.

Roseanna Alice Boswell is a queer poet and educator from Upstate New York. She earned her MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her debut poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, was released with Haverthorn Press in 2021 and she was the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2021 Chapbook Competition for her manuscript Imitating Light. Roseanna’s research interests include feminist theory, fat studies, and how these two fields speak to femininity and domesticity. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Stillwater, OK, with her husband and their two cats, Bean and Blossom.

(biographical information courtesy of https://roseannaaliceboswe.wixsite.com/poet/home)

– Caitlyn Mlodzik, MAR

Fiction Review: The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney

The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney. Columbus, OH, FORTHCOMING with Two Dollar Radio. 242 pages. $18.95, paperback. 

Many may fantasize about writing the Great American Novel, never working a nine-to-five job, and having constant unprotected sex without producing a child, but Kevin, the protagonist in The Red-Headed Pilgrim, fails in all of these respects. As a nervous, existentialist virgin who allows the possibility of sex to motivate all of his decisions, little of Kevin’s journey is new; he is a heterosexual white man hoping to achieve enlightenment by never working more than eighteen hours a week and entertaining every half-baked, drug-induced plan he cooks up. His privilege, ideologies, and frequent use of shrooms protect him from a meaningless reality that is always encroaching. 

In spite of his protagonist’s played out traits, Maloney finds a way to make his story and his perspective new. He posits fresh and disturbing concepts, like the idea that our “bones…are the seeds of our future skeletons.” Essential to his wit and insightfulness is the retrospective self-awareness he employs. Maloney satirizes the idolized nomadic lifestyle of the aspiring artist by filling Kevin with high-minded ideals and then sending him back and forth across the nation to follow women who typically reject him. Maloney often had me cackling. In describing his crying newborn daughter Zoe, Kevin says “She didn’t speak English. Probably she didn’t want to be born and I screwed everything up by having sex with her mom.” This idea encapsulates young Kevin; he projects his nihilism onto everyone and inadvertently develops empathy. 

Despite his efforts to avoid the mundane and the meaningless, Kevin often finds himself “cleaning liquid shit out of Zoe’s forearm crevices.” Once Zoe comes into his life, no amount of “praying without ceasing” can offer him greater meaning than she can. In The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Maloney envisions a hilarious reality in which we must give up on our dreams to care for those we love and begrudgingly find meaning along the way.

—Daniel Marcantuono, MAR

The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney will be released January 24, 2023. Preorder now at twodollarradio (dot) com. 

Featured Writer: Leila Chatti

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, October 13th, poet Leila Chatti will read her work in Prout Chapel as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. 

Through her collection Deluge, Leila Chatti chronicles her experience with illness, uncontrollable bleeding referred to as “flooding,” surgery, and remission through explorations of narratives of religious punishment, womanhood, shame, and oscillations of doubt and faith. Fittingly, Chatti’s poems are preoccupied with the grand scope of existence, as we are suspended by our pain and grief between the infinities before birth and after death. “Indeed, one day I will return to God, as it is to Him that I belong.” she writes in her poem “Testimony,” continuing “Indeed, this was part of the Message and the Message was received. / I do not speak for God and He does not speak to me. / This an (arrangement/estrangement). / When asked my religion I answer surrender.” Despite their scope, Chatti roots these poems squarely in the body, allowing worldly pain to evidence the divine; in “Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s office,” she writes “In my hand, an empty cup. / Mary crosses / her legs, fingers the slender / chain around her neck. / She rubs her thumb against / the pendant’s tiny face, his miniature / arms permanently splayed.” Leila Chatti’s poems are as candid as they are intense, and as excruciating in their origins as they are compassionate at their hearts. You absolutely must pick up her work.

—Samuel Burt, MAR

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. Among her many achievements, she was selected as winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Chatti has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and more. Her debut full-length collection Deluge was published by Copper Canyon in 2020, and you can find her work in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives and teaches in the Midwest.

(Biographical info and poems courtesy of leilachatti dot com)

Poetry Review: A Cluster of Noisy Planets

A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty. Rochester, NY, BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001, 80 pages. $17.00, paperback.

A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty is an account of the melancholic passing of time, expressed through lovely observations of our world. Reading these prose poems aloud, one can sense the soft drumming of Rafferty’s carefully constructed sentences. He is a true syntactical master at work: the rhythm—generated with simple commas and full stops—magnifies the tender, slow beauty of this close attention. Not only do these words, spoken aloud, create intimacy, they create quiet. One poem from the collection that comes to mind is named, “The Satin Lining of the Casket Reminds Me of a Jewelry Box,” in which the speaker addresses the odd objects that are often buried with the dead; yet, as peculiar as the subject of this poem may sound, the last two sentences are magnificent in their scope and beautification of the mundane: “We pack them in like we’re burying pharaohs, like there’s a pyramid of grief above them. And there is—only smaller, and made of dirt, in a land that won’t stop raining” (Rafferty 17). This short quote, two of the many wonderful sentences from this collection, recalls another aspect of this poetry collection worth mentioning: the role of objects and monuments. Rafferty fixates on the various artifacts which have withstood time, such as the Great Pyramids of Giza, The Roman Colosseum, and the Moon. Above all, these prose poems show the ongoing, continual movements of the human imagination, exemplified by an excellent poet who writes these love letters from his corner of the world.

—Lucas Clark, MAR