Brooklyn Arts Press Archives

158 pages, $15.95

Review by Anna Mebel

Matt Runkle is both a writer and a visual artist currently studying at University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. He writes short stories and prose poems, makes collages, comics, and art books. Though The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales is his first book of short stories, Matt Runkle has also published a zine called RUNX TALES. As an artist, he is interested in assemblages, juxtapositions, things that most people would discard. These artistic practices filter into his writing. In The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales, Runkle mixes fairy tales, love stories, satire, dystopia, prose poems, and careful observations of the ordinary.

The stories are often very short but always efficient, showing us flashes of worlds similar to our own, yet slightly off—an apocalyptic scenario in which people live out of their cars, a supermarket located on the border between two countries, a town in which the punishment is election to public office. He finds “places where comings and goings occur from every side,” where borders dissolve and relationships become unstable, letting worrisome aspects of human nature emerge. Continue reading →

Brooklyn Arts Press

78 pages, $15.95

Review by Anaïs Duplan

Now I the rower gentle on the water. Now I the water gentle / in refraction.

from “Little Schooner”

I can’t help but squeal in excitement whenever I read the first two lines of Joseph P. Wood’s poem, “Little Schooner.” The poem comes late in the collection – it heads the third and final section, Part III: Old-New World – but it’s perhaps the most enthralling poem in Broken Cage, for its music and for its painful sincerity. Nevertheless, while it’s decidedly salient, “Little Schooner” is only as powerful as it is because it lives in the world that the surrounding poems bring into existence.

“Now I the rower gentle on the water.” The speaker, the rower, is alone, as he almost always is. So follows an unrelenting self-scrutiny, which the reader encounters again and again in Broken Cage. For example, in “Of Anxiety,” Wood bombards himself with unanswerable questions. “Joseph, why do you shake like an egg / in quiet, why do you pontificate to the pan / like a wife, why do you hold the pen // shaking Joseph.” He is ruthless here: while one Joseph interrogates, the other Joseph quivers, unable to respond. In “Poor Ex,” the overwhelmed speaker continues to tremble:

My hands shake like boats––tossed on the sea
into which I’m falling––Captain, my pills!––lost
among the inlets––babble-brained––morosely
my hands shake. Continue reading →

Brooklyn Arts Press

[REVIEW] The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, by Matt Runkle

[REVIEW] Broken Cage by Joseph P. Wood