REVIEW: “Buttons and Soap” by Josh Pearce

Review of Josh Pearce, “Buttons and Soap,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 68 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The structure of the poem meant I had to read it a couple of times in different orders — once straight through, once with just the parentheticals and once with just the non-parentheticals — to see if I could determine how it should be read, because the first read through just left me confused. The parentheticals alone do make sense, and have a nice rhythm and rhyme to them; but what is left behind when they are extracted didn’t feel to me like it held together.

The upshot is that I spent more time confused about this poem than I did reading it, which unfortunately means this one didn’t work for me.

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REVIEW: “The Experience Machine” by Mark Dimaisip

Review of Mark Dimaisip, “The Experience Machine,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 62-63 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Kudos to the editors for placing Dimaisip’s poem immediately after Whalbring’s poem reviewed here: In this ordering, Dimaisip’s reads like a sequel to Whalbring’s. If the latter poem offers up a potential future, the former provides us with a singular, specific, concrete reality of that future.

I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted to this poem on its own, but in read conjunction with the other one, I really liked it.

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REVIEW: “Aging is a Word That Means ‘Slowly Becoming a Machine'” by Marcus Whalbring

Review of Marcus Whalbring, “Aging is a Word That Means ‘Slowly Becoming a Machine’,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 60-61 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I’ve come to really love and look forward to the poetry selection in each Radon Journal issue; the poems are exceptionally curated and there’s always at least one in every issue that is really, really good. In this issue, that poem is this one: Gorgeous and raw and aching and honest. I loved it.

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REVIEW: “The World Ends With a Whimper” by Nicholas De Marino

Review of Nicholas De Marino, “The World Ends With a Whimper,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 59 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When one starts off their piece with a call-back to such an iconic poem, it sets the reader’s expectations high. While the poem was a strong one (cleverly constructed so it could be read in multiple ways), I’m not sure the title helped rather than hindered it, especially as the title was also the opening line. I wonder what the poem would’ve been like if instead of setting things up to repeat an idea, the title was instead used to introduce something new and unexpected?

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REVIEW: “The World Has Been This Way For a Long Time” by Vincent Endwell

Review of Vincent Endwell, “The World Has Been This Way For a Long Time,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 44-47 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This title intrigued me, as there was a delightful ambiguity in what it is signalling — would this be a happy story or a sad one? It could be either!

And then it turned out to almost be neither, rather instead it was mostly a quiet story, “speculative” in the sense that the narrator spent a lot of time wondering what if, what if, what if. But at the end, there is definitely some solace that we as the reader can take away.

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REVIEW: “Dad Jokes” by David Lee Zweifler

Review of David Lee Zweifler, “Dad Jokes,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 35 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

At one page, Zweifler set expectations high before I even started reading it: You’ve really got to nail it, in such a short space. Between the title, and the opening lines that are filled with grief and uncertainty, I wasn’t sure if I was going to end up wholly let down by the end.

And I so wasn’t. That finally line brought a slightly anxious, slightly sad story into something flooded with hope.

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REVIEW: “Thicker Than Water” by Aeryn Rudel

Review of Aeryn Rudel, “Thicker Than Water,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 26-28 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a gruesome little gem of a story, set in a apocalyptic world; or perhaps our own world, in just a few decades’ time — you decide how soon you think global warming will suck us all dry and leave humans competing not only with animals for water, but also with the trees!

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REVIEW: “The Fish in the Garden” by Eleanor Lennox

Review of Eleanor Lennox, “The Fish in the Garden,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 13-19 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Death, and the aftermath of death.

I love stories that focus on the day-to-day, the mundane, the almost-humdrum; there’s enough high-stakes terror in the real world nowadays that I don’t need that in my fiction, too. This story was a perfect example of the former, a quiet meander through the details of life during the 11-year trip to Titan, full of exquisite little snapshots and so sad. What a beautifully put together story this was.

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