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Book Review :: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his most recent book, The Message, to a group of students enrolled in his writing class in 2022, calling them “comrades,” as he believes they all have an obligation to tell the truth through journalism. His first, brief essay—almost an introduction—provides his background and why he became interested in journalism, drawing on a Sports Illustrated story, as well as references to Shakespeare, Rakim, Audre Lorde, and Frederick Douglass. His father also helped point him in the direction of using research to understand important questions.

The rest of the book centers around three trips Coates took: to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. In Senegal, he visits places important in the sale of enslaved people, coming to understand that part of that story is myth—not the inhumanity, unfortunately, but the idea that there is a particular place that encapsulates all of that inhumanity, or that the inhumanity came only through colonization. He visits South Carolina to support a teacher who had allegedly violated a state law passed against teaching “critical race theory”; during a school board meeting he learns there are allies, as well as opponents.

The trip to Palestine is the longest section of the book, as Coates spends five days in Palestine for a literary festival and five days on the Israeli side. It is this section where Coates has his most dramatic epiphany, as he once compared the plight of the Israelis to formerly enslaved African Americans when he was making the argument for reparations. He sees, though, that Israel has now become an apartheid state, that those whom Germany once oppressed have now become the oppressor of others. Coates goes even further to show readers how Germany took the idea of race-based oppression from the United States and how Israel ultimately aligned themselves with South Africa.

Behind each of his trips, though, is the idea of what stories don’t get told. Whether that’s what he didn’t know about Senegal, what lawmakers in South Carolina were trying to keep students from learning, or how the media covers the oppression in Palestine—especially telling is that almost no major news outlet publishes work by people of Palestinian descent—Coates wants readers to dig deeper and find out what they’re not hearing.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Colored Television by Danzy Senna book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Colored Television, Danzy Senna’s latest novel, follows Jane, an English professor working on her second novel—centered around the idea of the mulatto (Jane’s term; she is mixed-race)—for a decade. She now needs to complete that novel as her sabbatical is ending, and she needs the publication to earn tenure. She and her husband Lenny—an artist who only produces art he believes in, whether that earns him any money or not, and it’s more often not—along with their two children, have moved from one living situation to another over that time.

They begin this novel having moved into a fabulous house owned by Brett, one of Jane’s friends from graduate school, though Jane believes he has sold out by becoming a screenwriter and script doctor. Jane, however, begins to follow him down that path, as her novel draft, which she finally finishes, is a dead end, according to her publisher and agent. She emails Brett’s agent, who then puts her in touch with Hampton Ford, a television producer who is interested in producing diverse content.

Without telling Lenny, Jane begins meeting with Hampton to discuss a series that explores a family of mixed-race characters, much like Jane’s, in a sitcom setting. Jane is enamored of the life Brett has, and she consistently envisions her family living that life, as she believes she just needs one break to escape the supposed poverty she lives in.

While Senna is certainly exploring race in her novel, she equally critiques class, especially the greed that can drive one to ignore all that one already has in life, as Jane seeks to live a life that Lenny and the children have no interest in. While the ending of the novel is a bit pat, the questions that Senna raises are anything but.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna. Riverhead Books, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Shahnaz Habib’s subtitle—An Irreverent History of Travel—is an apt description of her book, as she is, indeed, critical of what most people believe about travel and travel writing. For example, her opening chapter interrogates how guidebooks shape our views not only of where to go, but what to notice when we’re in those places, often leaving out the colonizing empires that lay behind those sites.

She discusses “passport privilege” in her second chapter, contrasting her experience trying to travel on an Indian passport with her husband, who has the much more desirable blue U.S. passport. She goes beyond that idea, though, to explore how passports began as a way of limiting travel, making it clear who gets in and who doesn’t.

In other chapters, she discusses railway systems and how the government and companies often took the land for the lines from Indigenous people groups, ignoring the treaties in the name of progress and tourism. She also explores nature and the outdoors, especially how many people groups—especially people of color—have a lack of access to those spaces.

Habib draws on her family and her hometown to examine why some towns begin to cater to tourists, while others, such as where her family moved, do not, as well as why some people love to travel, while others—like her father—do not. Rather than creating a clear dichotomy, though, she reminds readers that her father traveled through news and books, becoming more aware of the wider world than others who had visited countries across the globe.

Shahnaz Habib doesn’t merely want readers to question the benefits of tourism, as she’s a tourist herself, she admits. Instead, she wants to help them see behind the scenes of the entire idea of tourism, recognizing the people and cultures pushed to the margins, mainly so people with more coveted passports can believe they understand a world they haven’t yet begun to see.

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib. Catapult, December 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Playground by Richard Powers

Playground by Richard Powers book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The obvious playground in Richard Powers’ newest novel is an online platform Todd Keane developed, where users can submit comments people vote on for electronic currency, of sorts. He worked it out shortly after graduating college, which he attended with his best friend, Rafi Young, who wants to be a poet. The title also describes their love of games, in general, as they bond over chess, then Go, and even their relationship is a type of competitive game.

However, the ocean is also a type of playground, as Evie Beaulieu learns early in her life when her father uses her to test an early type of scuba equipment, leading her to spend as much time as she can underwater. She falls in love with the way the undersea animals play with one another or even by themselves. Unfortunately, humans also see the ocean as their playground, one more space they can colonize, disrupting and destroying the lives of those who were already there.

Ina Aroita’s life reinforces that idea, as she grew up on naval bases throughout the Pacific, but ends up on Makatea in French Polynesia, an island that phosphate mining had ravaged years before. Evie and Rafi are also there by the end of the novel, and a group of investors wants to use Makatea as a launching pad for man-made islands that exist outside of national jurisdictions (and, thus, regulations).

The narration moves between Todd’s telling his story to an unnamed listener—though the reader will ultimately discover who he’s talking to—and the stories of the three other characters until they all intersect on Makatea near the end of the novel. Powers also pulls a narrative trick, leaving the reader to wonder if the novel itself is one more playground, this time one that works for good.

In the same way that Powers helped readers see forests differently in Overstory, it’s clear he wants readers to wonder at the world beneath the sea, as he critiques the ways humanity has actively damaged oceans and the lives within. This time, though, he wants to remind readers that novelists can play, as well as preach.

Playground by Richard Powers. W.W. Norton, September 2024.

Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

By the time psychotherapist Leah Fisher was in her early 60s, she was sick of eating dinner alone while her husband, Charley, worked late into the evening. She was also sick of his reluctance to take an extended vacation. But rather than stew in resentment or anger, she presented him with a carefully thought-out plan. If he couldn’t envision taking a year-long trip – a real break from their life in the San Francisco Bay – she’d go alone.

As she presented it, the idea was more of a negotiation than an ultimatum. After all, Fisher still loved Charley and wanted to remain married. Nonetheless, she was ready for something new, an adventure. As the pair talked, they came up with an arrangement in which Fisher would travel for several months and then return home for a week or two. They also broached sexual infidelity and developed ground rules for what would, and would not, be allowed. Moreover, Charley arranged his occasional vacations to meet her in some of the seven countries – Bali, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Java, and Mexico – she visited.

Fisher’s travels – staying in each location for a month or longer – allowed her to learn Spanish and dance salsa, all while maintaining the spark between her and her mate. It also allowed her to contribute to the communities she visited. Indeed, Fisher moved beyond tourism and volunteered in numerous capacities, running a short-term women’s group and translating and adapting a workbook, first created for American hurricane survivors, to help kids process their emotions after a mudslide destroyed their homes.

Deeply felt and emotionally honest, Fisher spent 16 years writing and revising My Marriage Sabbatical. As she and Charley continually alter their relationship, they model lived feminism and compromise. The result is wanderlust-inducing – the stuff of dreams and daring.

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher. She Writes Press, January 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Journalist and longtime social justice activist Pat LaMarche’s latest book, Humble Pie, defies categorization. Yes, it deconstructs the horror of hunger in the US. And yes, it tells poignant stories of people – the housed, the unhoused, and the doubled-or-tripled up – who rely on the country’s nearly 100,000 food pantries to feed themselves and their families. And yes, it showcases the inadequacies of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs. But Humble Pie is more than an expose about people’s struggles. The book also sheds light on the cruel and arbitrary policies that govern both public and private social welfare programs and highlights the false narrative that continually smears low-income folks as undeserving, lazy, or morally lax.

Moreover, the book blurs the line between memoir – LaMarche’s account of the many years she’s worked to ameliorate hunger and homelessness – and cookbook. It’s a fascinating amalgam: Vivid anecdotes from homeless and formerly homeless individuals are presented alongside recipes for the low-cost meals they’ve created (or sometimes adapted). In addition, numerous budget-friendly recipes from British chef Archie, The Pie Guy, a former restauranteur, give the book heft.

“Food is more than sustenance,” LaMarche writes. “It is a form of communication, an expression of love.” Indeed, Humble Pie is a heaping serving of all of this. As a how-to guide, Humble Pie will help poor individuals and families survive. But the book can also be read as a policy guide for lawmakers, social service workers, and people who simply want to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors.

As LaMarche reports, approximately nine million people worldwide die of starvation annually. The US is not exempt: Anti-hunger researchers at Feeding America note that 40 million Americans are food insecure. “Starving children hamstring a country’s ability to flourish on the world stage,” she concludes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians remembered this?

All proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit anti-poverty organizations in Pennsylvania.

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Jeremy Ruby. Charles Bruce Foundation, November 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Ordinary Entanglement, Melissa Dickey speaks of the “harnessed unharnessed bound unbound” particular to a woman’s private life as mother, daughter, and lover and her reckoning with “power / and deception” in political society, “where marks are made.” But she “must be careful not to see everything / through a wound.”

This is a challenging endeavor for a mother when she realizes she has “brought / [her] children to [her] childhood”; when “betting on climate change [is a] good bet”; when the destruction of “historic Black neighborhoods” makes way for an interstate highway.

Dickey’s attention to what is unfolding internally — the thought of buying a “four-dollar coffee”— in response to what the poet encounters on the street — “people living / in tents”— is the entanglement of life. In other words, the phenomenon of “getting used to getting used to / a feeling [she doesn’t] want to get used to.”

The poet comes to recognize the plain fact that “everything we do we do at some cost.” It may be true that “people / have reasons for doing bad things / / but a reason doesn’t make the thing good.” And this is only one side of the reckoning, “Another knock / at the same door.” Dickey also aims to reckon with “goodness,” to “try to say ‘blessed’ and mean it.”

As she learns “how to live threaded / how to live tethered,” Melissa Dickey “disperse[s] what nags / let[s] a prayer unravel.”

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey. CSU Poetry Center, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: EtC by Laura Mullen

EtC by Laura Mullen book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Laura Mullen’s EtC, “each good lyric [is] dislodged from its place,” making way for “each new definition” of “what to let matter, and how much, and when.” What matters to Mullen is what is “Reserved for advertising”—the female body, “Elsie the C,” corporate power, and the “Industrialization of America’s / food supply.” “[T]here are / Always more cows,” but “repetition could lead to estrangement.”

The collection’s title, EtC, doubles as the abbreviation for the Latin phrase et cetera and as an anacronym for “Elsie the Cow.” “It’s a matter / Of emphasis.” Or “repetition could lead to” a narrator “uncertain, potentially mistaken, exposed as unreliable.” “Nothing in this book / should be confused / with the actual.”

What is in this book is “an arrangement / Of grievances,” “a collection of cuts” related to “a mostly hostile country. America. A land where you’re expected to pay, one way or the other for intimacy.” Between “the world that is / and exhibition,” Mullen is “trying to make the word [milk] come back to sense” as nourishment and eschew extraction.

Whether what is “Measured in exchange” is “Meat or milk” or a woman’s body that “became another border to be crossed,” Laura Mullen’s EtC asks “The most urgent questions facing us.” The poet leaves the reader contorting the “Sacred, scared, / Scarred.”

EtC by Laura Mullen. Solid Objects, November 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Susto by Tommy Archuleta

Susto by Tommy Archuleta book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Before reading any poem in Tommy Archuleta’s Susto, the reader is situated by Eliseo “Cheo” Torres’s definition of “susto”: “1. shock; 2. magical fright.” That definition suggests the lyric, elegiac, surrealist, and fabulist poems to follow. The poems, presented in monostich, couplets, and tercets, fit the relationships central to Archuletta’s poems, the speaker-son’s relationship with himself and his relationship with his mother and father. The lack of poem titles has the effect of creating poetic continuity and expressing the continuousness of a son’s love for his parents and grief over their deaths.

Archuletta’s are personal poems, a “love / / letter to suffering” that he and his family have withstood. “Say little knives / litter the ground of every life / / we survive.” As the speaker-son “weep[s] / with” his life and “speak[s] to” his parent’s relationship he gains perspective, writing “light is light no matter how / dark things get.” This perspective is necessary to “survive [on] this side” and “keep singing.”

Each of the collection’s four sections contains one or two “Remedio[s],” botanical-based treatments sharing traditional knowledge for healing both spirit and body. The speaker-son is explicit about “suffering” caused by “pain / god and sometimes fever” that calls to be healed. The origins of some of the suffering remain private and mysterious—“after what happened / happened”—but nonetheless are felt. There is a sense that the speaker-son most desires to break out of an imprisonment of self, “the wolf you / the crow you / the weary supplicant.”

To break free, Tommy Archuleta is beseeching “of God,” “the ancients,” and of mother:

“Singing as
if I’ve always known

that hearing is the last
sense to go”

Tommy Archuleta’s songs “for you me and the ghosts / / inside us” all are those of a curandero and therefore spirit medicine.

Susto by Tommy Archuleta. The Center for Literary Publishing, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore

Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Speaking from a Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore knows “the long burden / of… death.” In “Summer Swim,” the poet writes, “Too often, my poems are love notes / / to the past.”

While Whittemore’s poems harvest “a penchant / for melancholy,” they also write through an acceptance of multiple losses and a recovery of a whole self. Just as “death upon death” gives rise to an “urgent but futile wish to control its narrative,” so too, “is it possible to love one’s / own tattered self.”

The “tattered self” in Nest of Matches “seek[s], like every / / fled human before [her],” a sense of self “beyond fragmentation” and the “freedom” to “unfurl” a queer self as legitimate of life and worthy of love.

The tension between these dynamics is reflected in the collection’s title. In “nest” there is shelter but it is a hotbed of undesirable things. The hemispherical shape of a nest echoes in the sometimes-ruminating poems and in the twelve-poem series devoted to each month’s full moon.

In “Flower Moon,” a name given to May’s full moon attributed to the Algonquin peoples, Whittemore cues the reader to a “turn” of awareness “never-not-awkward”:

“Here I am again,
giving the moon
my baggage,
asking it to carry
my longing,
my fullness.”

Depicting the tidal forces between Earth and the moon and self and other, Whittemore’s “moon” series cannot help but conjure Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (1972). The moon is a feminine symbol associated with water, emotion, the rhythm of light, and the cycle of time. Or as Whittemore writes in “Aubade,” “there’s so many agains inside me,” “new and repetitious as moons.”

“Language remains a wobbly bridge” in Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, but language is what “veins” the collection’s “fearless and true” conversations over “life’s / many distances.”

Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore. Autumn House Press, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Detroit Lions by Dave Birkett

The Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timely by Dave Birkett book cover image

Review by Denise Hill

As a native Michigander and lifelong fan, I was excited to see Dave Birkett’s, The Detroit Lions : An Illustrated Timeline. First, there’s no one better to tell this story than Birkett, a sports journalist covering the team since 2010, and second – it’s the Detroit Lions! Still, I was skeptical I could appreciate this tome, with reminiscences back to the team’s start in 1934 (waaaay before my fan time) and (sorry Dave) likely a lot of stats to make my brain wander.

Winnowing 90 years of history down to under 200 pages, with pictures, is no small task, but Birkett harnesses this successfully. There is a new segment every page or two-page spread (perfect for open-book display) and a photo on every page.

Each segment focuses on a player, game, coach, element of play, or some facet related to the team. I learned the roots of the Thanksgiving game-day tradition (“Why is it always the Lions?”) and the team’s signature colors, Honolulu Blue and Silver, and about the two players who sang backup on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” While there are many celebratory stories, as a reporter and not a PR spin doctor, Birkett does not shy away from somber and sometimes downright shameful notes: rifts among personnel, devastating game losses, unethical behaviors, players sustaining life-altering injuries, and the passing of many greats due to various causes.

And yes, there’s data for enthusiasts who love to recall these key moments, but Birkett couches this within unique narratives, managing a fine balance to keep readers with a range of interests engaged. Birkett’s own voice is subtle, crafting the historical record and quotes from central figures to speak as the voice of The Lions. His rhetoric guides readers to sense the sorrow, disgust, frustration, excitement, and humor in many relived memories.

As Thanksgiving comes around, and you roll your eyes and once again ask, “Why is it always the Lions?” Answer: Because it’s THE LIONS! And each year, believe me, fans will also roll their eyes and ask, “Will they do it this year?”

What say you, Dave?

Don’t answer, because as true Lions fans know, predictions don’t matter. We always show up to cheer our team for the win.

The Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline by Dave Birkett. Reedy Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.

Book Review :: Reclaiming Venus by Maya Smith and Alvenia Bridges

Reclaiming Venus by Maya Smith and Alvenia Bridges book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Maya Smith was looking for a short-term rental so she could complete a research project, she answered an ad for an $800 apartment share in midtown Manhattan. It was 2014, and while the offer sounded too good to be true, when she arrived at the building the situation proved more fortuitous than she could have imagined.

The prime tenant, Alvenia Bridges, was now down on her luck but had once rubbed elbows with Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Hall, Bill Graham, and other celebrities. In fact, for a time, Bridges was an iron-willed concert coordinator, working for The Rolling Stones and Roberta Flack. She’d earlier been a highly sought-after model thanks to her friendship with race car driver John von Neumann, a man with well-oiled connections to the rich and famous of the 1960s and 70’s.

It’s a remarkable story, and as Bridges slowly confided in Smith, the pair decided to collaborate on a memoir. The result, Reclaiming Venus – Venus was von Neumann’s nickname for Bridges–is a gossipy but intriguing look at one woman’s escape from the racism and sexism of 1950s Kansas. As the story unfolds, readers learn that she sidestepped parental abuse and neglect, a feat made possible by her grandmother. Then there’s luck–being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people–something that was no doubt aided by the fact that Bridges was a six-foot-tall beauty.

While her decline is not as clearly detailed as her ascent, Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges is nonetheless an entertaining account of one woman’s determination to live boldly and on her own terms. Moreover, despite not being a civil rights or feminist activist, Bridges always modeled chutzpah, standing up for herself and other women and challenging white male domination of the music and fashion industries. Unsung until now, Reclaiming Venus brings Alvenia Bridges to public attention. At 80, she has earned her laurels.

Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges by Maya Smith and Alvenia Bridges. Rising Action Publishing Co., October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh

Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sarah Smarsh became well-known for her memoir Heartland, about growing up in Kansas, but she honed her craft as a writer working as a journalist. As she describes it, she’s in the last generation to receive an old-school journalism education, but she has spent her career writing for digital publications, as newspapers slashed their staffs.

This collection gathers together thirty-seven pieces she published over the past decade, almost all of which center around issues of class and/or perceptions of those who live in the Midwest, including her family. Smarsh wants readers to understand what it means to live in poverty in America, including being a member of the working poor. For example, in her piece “Blood Brother,” she talks about her brother, who followed the traditional path to success by going to college, but who ended up selling plasma to be able to pay his bills. In “Rural Route,” she even explores the importance of the postal service to those who live outside urban areas.

The other main idea that runs through her essays are people’s misperceptions of Kansas as “Trump country,” a particularly timely topic. She’s especially critical of those attached to various forms of media who live on either coast of America and portray those in the middle (when they portray them at all) through such a narrow lens.

In “In Celebration of Rare and Exquisite Accuracy from Hollywood,” she praises the show Somebody Somewhere for a realistic portrayal of people in live in Manhattan, Kansas, pointing out that the people behind the show are from the Midwest. In several essays, she reminds readers that college-educated White voters were largely behind President Trump’s election in 2016, not the supposedly uneducated rural White voters who received most of the blame.

Near the end of her collection, she also includes three more personal essays about when she considered running for public office; her husband; and her mother. Overall, the primary focus of the book is on “the unseen,” to whom she dedicates the collection. She helps readers see them in all their humanity, the goal of any good writer.

Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh. Scribner, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart

Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Katherine Stewart’s latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, draws connections between the disparate groups and individuals who have spent the last 40-plus years working to turn the US into a theocratic, authoritarian regime. The players include Evangelical/Pentecostal/Catholic churches; men’s rights activists; funders; conservative think tanks, training entities, and organizations; homeschooling and voucher supporters; conspiracy theorists; people who want to erode church-state separation;  anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-LGBTQIA “family values” activists; and MAGA-supporting elected officials and jurists at every level of government. 

Stewart spent years attending conservative conferences and lectures, reading their materials,  and interviewing people on the right. Her eyewitness account is riveting and will terrify anyone who believes in democratic governance. Her conclusion is stark: While the right-wing coalition is fragile, the many groups that comprise its ranks are united by purpose. But they no longer simply want “a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.” Instead, they “want to burn down the house.” Moreover, she writes that the rise of the right intentionally uses obfuscation “to advance its undemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation.”  Ultimately, she concludes, it’s about power. 

Lies, Money, and God is a compelling read. At the same time, Stewart stresses that resistance by progressive entities and individuals can defeat the right. She urges the left to think long-term, be strategic, and relentlessly exploit contradictions in conservative unity: “Does it want small government or does it want a government big enough to share your bedroom and your body? …Does it want free speech or does it want to ban books, limit the information doctors are allowed to share with patients, and compel religious speech in public schools?” 

Good questions. Stewart argues that “heightening and exposing” these contradictions will benefit both the general public and “supporters of anti-democratic reaction.”  It will require hard work, she writes, but if we want to preserve the republic, it’s the only option.

Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart. Bloomsbury Publishing, February 2025 (preorder available).

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold

Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

While the current spate of book bans and censorship attempts by Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have received a great deal of attention, essayist Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality reports that even in less politically-charged times, the books we read, the movies and television shows we watch, and the video games we play, are heavily controlled by market forces, fear of upsetting the status quo, and pressures from both the right and the left to influence our viewpoints and emotional responses.

This tendency, she writes, goes back to Plato, whose Republic warned that when people encounter tales of gods or heroes “behaving badly,” they sometimes emulate their negative traits. The Greeks called such imitation “mimesis” and many joined the famed philosopher to argue that society needed “to cut the heart out of fiction: all vice, all cruelty, anything that might tempt the masses by example.”

As is obvious, this was–and is–a fool’s errand.

Gold’s text is dense, but Dangerous Fictions is a soundly reasoned dive into how fictional representations are used and interpreted. “The problem isn’t that fiction contains the power to mobilize people for good or evil,” she writes, “but the deeper problem is simply power itself: who has it and who doesn’t…In the end, what fiction does, and what it’s capable of doing, is something quite different from political action.”

Take the emergent genre of climate fiction. “Only human beings can take political action: only human beings can dismantle the existent fossil fuel infrastructure and build the new structure of energy and mitigation that will be necessary to cope with temperatures that will keep rising,” she concludes.

Indeed, she’s right: Apocalyptic narratives will not save us. Likewise, while fiction can introduce readers to people and places they’d likely never otherwise encounter, expecting this exposure to eviscerate racism, homophobia, or sexism is unrealistic. In the end, fiction is neither dangerous nor safe. It just is.

Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold, Soft Skull Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

The Essential Howard Gardner on Education by Howard Gardner book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

According to acclaimed Harvard professor, Howard Gardner, “There is in the United States (and likely elsewhere) an enormous desire to make education uniform, to treat all students in the same way, and to apply the same kinds of one-dimensional metrics to all. This trend is inappropriate on scientific grounds and distasteful on ethical grounds.”

In fact, Gardner writes that by ignoring the “multiple intelligences” of each individual, school systems fail to recognize that people learn in different ways. This not only stifles creativity, but fails to build on student strengths, inclinations, and talents.

Small wonder that so many children hate school.

But alternatives exist. In place of rigid classes where standardized testing is routine, Gardner suggests apprenticeships and project-based learning as a hands-on supplement to didactic instruction. This, he argues, builds on the differing forms of intelligence exhibited by students and allows them to find their footing in whichever intelligence sphere is dominant, whether bodily-kinetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, linguistic, logical, musical, naturalist, or spatial.

Unsurprisingly, Gardner’s definition of intelligence is broad and encompasses “the ability to solve problems and to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings. ” And while he recognizes that the ability to read, write, and calculate remains imperative – and requires rote lessons – he stresses that the time spent on standardized test preparation is ill-spent. Instead, he writes, when teachers know their students, they can easily evaluate progress as part of their daily interactions.

This makes good sense.

Likewise, the 29 essays in The Essential Howard Gardner on Education argue for “individual-centered schools” that allow kids to develop by utilizing their natural affinities. It’s a persuasive, if lofty, vision centered on respect for, and nurturance of, children and the adults they’ll become. Both students and teachers would be better served if schools heeded his wisdom.

The Essential Howard Gardner on Education by Howard Gardner. Teacher’s College Press, May 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, appears to be about a young woman, Kismet, who is in love with Hugo, but marries Gary Geist, who seems to be protected by a guardian angel (or perhaps by his privilege), while also following Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who works driving a truck hauling sugar beets to the plant. There’s also a subplot about Crystal’s husband (though they’re not really married), Martin, who made poor investments for the local Catholic church’s renovation fund, losing everything in the 2008 recession (or embezzling it).

The novel is about those people and the area in North Dakota where they live, and their stories are interesting enough on their own to keep the reader engaged, wondering why Kismet would make the decisions she makes, how Crystal will cope with Martin’s disappearance (and the FBI’s investigation into that disappearance), and what secret Gary is hiding from Kismet.

It’s what characters don’t know or willfully ignore that truly matters, though, as Erdrich shows the effects humanity has on the planet, as well as on each other. Gary’s family signed a contract to raise only genetically-modified sugar beets, ones that will withstand the weedkiller RoundUp, refusing to see the effects that deal will have on their land and themselves. Americans willfully overlook the bailout of the banks, while people lose their houses, as well as church renovation funds. The country has always overlooked the way they treated Indigenous people, taking their land as well as their lives, leaving them with little of either, well into the twenty-first century.

Erdrich uses the sugar beets—and sugar, in general—as a metaphor for what we do to the planet and to each other. What the characters believe will be sweet in the short-term has long-term consequences, while the difficult decisions are the ones that lead to meaningful relationships. And all the while, the Red River runs through their lives, unchanging, ever-flowing, always changing.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. HarperCollins, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild

She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

By “digging deep / in [her] bone memory” with “unfailing hands,” Cree poet Rosanna Deerchild offers readers She Falls Again. In her third collection of poems, Deerchild devotes her attention to “cultural storytelling” and “sing[s] honour songs” while “carry[ing] / her broken notes” through “the voices / of [her] mother / her mother and hers.” The songs and stories are “history mementoes”:

“it is written on my mother’s residential school skin
it is whispered by my grandmother’s tb ghost
it is the lonely grave of my grandfather in your field of honour
it is the target on my back”

“[L]ooking madder than a broken treaty,” “the-woman-who-falls-from-the-sky was an indian woman.” But hers is not mental illness; it is the intense rage of a “normal person” in an impossible situation where one person accuses the other of a fault which the accuser bears: “they call us savage / while they ravage // the earth our mother.” To the dominant/mainstream culture, an “indian woman” is “disney porn” and “a body of land conquered.” The “burial mounds // sharp and waiting.”

The poet “gathers all her grief” around Indigenous women who are “not /missing / just not here,” and for whom there is no explanation for “why so many / of just-us go without justice.” On the violence toward Indigenous women, she will “be silent no more.”

Rosanna Deerchild is “the returning voice / from the silence // the telling / story” of the women of her matrilineal line. Their “stories are scars [she] turns to stars / set free in the sky of telling.”

In She Falls Again, women rise up,

“making their way back
to the front

making their way
to lead”

In her “strong woman song,” Rosanna Deerchild “writes [women] alive.

She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild. Coach House Books, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson

Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson sings “Blues got me and gone” to “Say woman,” to claim her voice, her yes, and to say no. To “arrange a resistance,” the poet speaks with candor about the female body, desire, and aging, speaks from “anguish” about male violence against females and police violence against people of color, and, determined not to “fail history,” she claims her role as “a daughter” who has “lived to tell you this” about the “Blue Water” “sorry with our bones.” Dear Reader, “how the choices are few for / those who ignore women in revolution.”

To “forsake the grim, / or shake the shadows,” Thompson “practice[s]” in poems in a variety of forms from abecedarian and villanelle to cento. By my count, there are nine centos in the collection. What the ekphrastic form is to painting, the cento is to poetry. Derived from the Latin word “patchwork,” the cento offers the poet an associative compositional mode and a formal device by which she recontextualizes the writing and accentuates the voices of poets Ai, Wanda Coleman, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez, among others, as relevant, even essential, in lives “long as this.”

“Say history. Claim. Say wild.” As resistance engenders insistence, the poems of Blue on a Blue Palette “praise” survival, suggesting Lucille Clifton’s lines: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” Like Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” among other poems, Thompson’s poems express strength of self.

Celebrating her identity as woman and poet of color, acknowledging the “unnumbered regrets” of history, and honoring the friendship of poets in life and on the page, Blue on a Blue Palette is Lynne Thompson’s “praise-song.”

Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson. BOA Editions, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Freeman’s Challenge by Robin Bernstein

Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Auburn State Prison opened in 1816, prisoners were forced to do unpaid work in several for-profit industries: making furniture or manufacturing carpets, combs, carriage lamps, or animal harnesses. Harvard history professor Robin Bernstein calls it “penal capitalism,” and her riveting book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, tells the story of inmate William Freeman, a free-born Black teenager who was incarcerated from 1840-1845 for stealing a horse, a crime he denied.

From the start, Freeman bristled at having to labor without pay and opposed the prison’s nighttime solitary confinement, enforced silence, beatings, and water torture for worksite infractions. His resistance escalated after a guard battered Freeman so severely that his eardrum shattered and his temporal bone was damaged. This left him deaf and intellectually impaired – but still so enraged that he sued the prison for unlawful imprisonment and back wages after he was released. The lawsuit failed. Likewise, his attempts to find gainful employment.

Frustrated, Freeman began collecting weapons and in March 1846, he entered the home of George and Mary Van Nest, white people he barely knew, and killed both adults and a child. He then went to another home and killed again. Although Freeman subsequently tried to escape, he was quickly apprehended.

Freeman’s trial pitted those who favored execution against those who favored life imprisonment and prompted a slew of racially charged arguments about Black moral depravity and inferiority. Moreover, whether Freeman was insane, inherently criminal, or a victim of anti-Black prejudice took center stage. Freeman never testified. Although he was sentenced to hang, he died of tubercular phthisis at age 22.

Bernstein masterfully transports contemporary readers to the 19th century and details how popular culture sensationalized the murders and trial. She also depicts the city of Auburn’s development and charts the benefits of the prison economy for local townspeople.

Two hundred-plus years later, prisons continue to benefit. Auburn is now the oldest continually operating maximum-security prison in the US; today’s inmates earn just 65 cents per hour for their labor.

Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein. University of Chicago Press, May 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023

Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023 book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In the expanded edition of Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023, Mojdeh Bahar has selected and translated the poetry by one hundred and four Persian women poets born after September 1941. The bilingual Persian and English anthology features poems that have not previously appeared in a book and include classical Persian poetic forms such as ghazals, do-beti (couplets), and robai’i (quatrains), though most of the poems have been written in free verse’s open form.

Here, an arresting quatrain by Fariba Arabnia:

“I am fine.
Just like a farm
Its crops razed by locusts
No longer worried about sickles.”

An ethos of connection characterizes the spirit of the anthology. The poets connect to their feelings, to contemporary women poets from Iran and the Iranian diaspora, to the Persian literary tradition, and to literary and social themes through the triumvirate lens of history, ideology, and geography.

These women poets, “citizen[s] of the state of wandering” (Nahid Bagheri Goldschmeid), have traveled “inconsolable borders” (Pegah Ahmadi) with “bloody hands / in their pockets” (Shabnam Azar) and the “scent of petroleum” (Roja Chamankar) in the air, have “survived many storms” (Mana Aghaee) to claim their dignity, imploring “Let me be a woman” (Razieh Bahrami Khoshnood).

Here, a candid excerpt from Mahshid Naghashpour:

“Women strive
for equality with men
What a futile and ill-defined effort
Equality with men who have caused chaos
and war in the world!
And who hold the detonator in their hand
It can’t go on like this
We must think of something!
Maybe it would be better for men to strive
for equality with women”

Writing against oppression, censorship, and exile, and “with dream / Hope / Anticipation” (Niki Firoozkoohi), these women poets take refuge in language, “writing… in order to live” (Maryam Jafari Azarmani).

Poem by poem, Song of the Ground Jay introduces Anglophones to the “vertigoes” of Persian women poets’ fierce hearts beyond the borders of their “shackled” lives. Like the Iranian Ground Jay (Podoces pleskei), the anthology’s sand-colored, black-throated mascot, adapts to dry habitats so too have Persian women poets adapted to their “battle with words” (Sanaz Zaresani). Despite “the lump in a throat” (Neda Abkari) the “razor-sharp tongue[s]” of these poems “shine” and offer readers trilling cries and melodic notes as they “kill with poetry” (Zahra Zaman)!

Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023 selected and translated by Mojdeh Bahar. Gordyeh Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America by Joel Edward Goza

Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America by Joel Edward Goza book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Joel Edward Goza, a white professor of ethics at Simmons College, believes that the United States cannot become a truly interracial democracy unless white people find ways to “repent, repay, and repair” the damage caused by slavery, Jim Crow, and the continued economic and social subjugation of Black Americans.

In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza makes his case, delving into history to find the ideological underpinnings that continue to classify Black people as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. The policies and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are parsed and each man’s complicity “in creating and perpetuating a nation divided along racial lines” is highlighted. But Goza does not let contemporary political leaders off the hook and the coded language of law-and-order, “welfare queens,” and personal responsibility is analyzed for its ongoing impact on policy and personal relationships.

Likewise, popular culture. Goza writes that notions of Black sloth, sexual deviance, intellectual inferiority, and irresponsibility popularized by eugenicist Madison Grant (1864-1937) and Baptist minister-turned-novelist Thomas Dixon (1865-1946), have had long-lasting resonance – leading to still-segregated and unequal public schools and still-festering white fear of miscegenation and Black power among many white Americans.

These realities, Goza argues, need to be reckoned with. In fact, he writes, it is high time for white people to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy and racism and excise both.

While this is an admittedly tall order, Goza is an optimist who believes that white folks will eventually support reparations, including monetary payments, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, and the over-policing of underresourced and neglected Black communities. He also believes they’ll support changing the tax codes so that wealthy Americans of all races will be required to pay their fair share.

Rebirth of a Nation presents these necessities as both a challenge and an inspiration. It’s a powerful injunction.

Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America by Joel Edward Goza; Foreword by William J. Barber III. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Ghost Work by Robert Colman

Ghost Work by Robert Colman book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Robert Colman’s Ghost Work joins recent fatherhood-focused poetry collections, including James Lindsay’s Only Insistence (2023), Bruce Snider’s Fruit (2020), and Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day (2019). While these other collections engage fatherhood by meditating on having a child or being childless, Colman’s Ghost Work offers readers a sober and heartbreaking meditation on the gradual loss of his father from dementia. The “father/son equation / now recognizably finite,” he asks, “What gain / to argue facts with him…?” “Is it his memory, or a ghost of mine?”

Throughout the collection, in what feels like close to real time, the poet-son seeks the “right words / to contain” what is disappearing, “‘Father’ in every sentence” and “‘Father’ like a sentence.” Words contain, sentences contain, and so does poetic form. The poet uses the received forms of the ghazal, pantoum, sonnet, and triolet to hold his grief and “stake the way.” Yet despite all attempts to avert loss, “We’ve lost the ear to identify the bird. / We’ve lost the language of the hollow / to find it.”

In Ghost Work, Robert Colman traces the evolution of loss and generously includes the reader in a most primal, personal time of grief. These poems face “death in facts” with dignity and love all the way through to their final breaths.

Ghost Work, by Robert Colman. Palimpsest Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie N. Baker

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie N. Baker book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The story Professor and Journalist Carrie N. Baker tells in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics takes place at the intersection of public health and political posturing. Players include feminists, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, state lawmakers, and anti-abortion actors who, for four decades, have grappled over protocols for pill distribution and use, a battle that largely sidesteps the fact that abortion medication has been used to safely end unwanted pregnancies in 96 countries.

But overly-cautious US lawmakers aside, Baker reports that the pills – called mifepristone and misoprostol – are typically taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and now account for 63 percent of abortions that are arranged via telemedicine or by visiting US health centers or contacting online clinics.

It’s a remarkable figure, and Baker writes that she expects it to grow.

Moreover, the rapid development of informal pill distribution networks, largely promoted on the internet, presently help an untold number of people acquire pills. According to Baker, these efforts began to skyrocket after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (which upended legal protections for abortion.) “The overturn of Roe removed abortion pills from the medical system in many states and spurred the development of informal networks of pill distribution and support for using them,” she reports. “Rather than moving patients to providers, advocates worked to move pills to people.” The upshot is that people have become increasingly aware that pills can be easily purchased and used at home.

That said, Baker acknowledges that abortion medication is not a panacea and recognizes that abortion surgery will sometimes be necessary; she also cautions readers that people have been arrested and convicted for acquiring pills unlawfully. Still, despite legal risks, Abortion Pills celebrates the determined feminists and public health activists who have put abortion medication directly into women’s hands.

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie N. Baker. Amherst College Press, December 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran

Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

“The first step is admitting it,” opens Barbara Tran’s debut Precedented Parroting. The “it” is either something the speaker wishes to forget or is the speaker “admitting” to being a “willful forgetter.” The speaker has “taken this step many times.” To remember poses risks. Memories represent something “that plagues” and cause the speaker to “become stranded”; the memories at the fore, those specific and unique to a Vietnamese family, their immigration, and the anti-Asian sentiments and violence they survive/d. Throughout the collection, the reader witnesses the struggle between forgetting, “admitting,” and “sharing.” In the poem “Blue from a Distance,” the poet writes, “There is a phrase / in Vietnamese chia buồn / sharing sadness.”

From poem to poem, Tran turns the pages of a family photo album, “slicing / open” or “framing” a “moment” of her memory within her family’s life. The poet defines trauma as the nesting of a smaller figure inside a larger figure — “each loss / encompasses smaller / losses” like a bird’s “feather each barb / holds smaller / barbs.”

A cacophony of birds flock Tran’s poems. In the first poem alone, a raven, drongo, kingfisher, kite, cormorant, heron, egret, and sandpipers appear. As the title suggests, the parrot takes precedent. Parrots, readers are told in the title poem, respond to trauma in ways similar to humans: “They rock themselves to comfort / themselves They scream and suffer / from insomnia and nightmares.” But birds also have the ability to “let go their contact / with the earth and water.”

These “poem[s] are a road map / writ” “in measured layers, offering facts withholding / crucial details” by a speaker who “comes from a family / of unreliable narrators.” That is because it is “really difficult / to learn / how to live,” “to find / [one’s] own feather.” The poems in Precedented Parroting mark a beginning “telling,” and in this beginning, Barbara Tran sings as birds do.

Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran. Palimpsest Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The New York Times Book Review used to have a question in their weekly interview with authors where they would ask that author what book the President should read. The answers were often rather enlightening, but they became more political when Donald Trump was in the White House, which is when, I believe, the newspaper stopped asking the question. Matthew Desmond’s book would be a good answer, no matter who the President is, so I’m sorry that question isn’t there any longer.

Desmond lays out a solid argument that the poverty in America isn’t accidental, and it isn’t a result of laziness on the part of those who are poor. Instead, poverty is due to a concerted effort by politicians and corporations. The policies in the U.S. create poverty and keep people in that situation under the guise of a scarcity of resources. Similarly, corporations claim they cannot afford to pay workers more or they will have to charge consumers more for their products, all while recording record profits and bonuses for CEOs.

Desmond doesn’t let the average reader—white and at least middle class—off the hook, either. He points out that many government benefits actually make life better for people who are not poor—whether that be the ability to write off mortgage interest or zoning laws that drive up housing prices—not those who need the most help.

Thus, he calls on readers to vote and act in such a way to help alleviate poverty, especially by supporting companies that actually pay their employees a living wage (he doesn’t name particularly egregious businesses, such as Amazon, but they readily come to mind). However, real change has to come at the policy level, as poverty is, in fact, by design, so the solutions will need to be, as well.

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. Crown, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Stedfast by Ali Blythe

Stedfast by Ali Blythe book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Stedfast, his third collection of poetry, Ali Blythe responds to John Keats’s last sonnet, which opens with the line: “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—” As if cutting a key from the past, Blythe disassembles Keats’s poem, by a full line, half line, or word at a time, then reassembles it across the titles of Stedfast’s poems. For instance, the first three poems in Stedfast are titled “Bright Star,” “Would I were stedfast,” and “As thou art.”

The poems of Stedfast are love poems in the romantic tradition, delivered in couplets and by “lyric address” from a speaker who whispers “disquieting thoughts” to a lover “asleep.” “And so on down the page” the “export is memory,” “the same old stories” by a “ghostwriter.” Via “astral projection” and “delicate revolutions,” Blythe reconceives and transforms Keats’s single sonnet into a book-length nocturne.

Taking place over “one night,” the collection meditates on the idea of steadfastness in romantic relationships, and by extension, in romantic poetry. As “one myth” dissolves “within / another, risking / our own nihility,” the poet grapples with the tension between “allusions” and illusions, illusions and reality, a romantic past and a fragile future.

In Stedfast, Ali Blythe’s poems constitute a “path / of devotion” to other and poetry, and they “seize what shines.”

Stedfast by Ali Blythe. icehouse poetry, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The premise of Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, sounds like it could be the basis for a Hollywood comedy: people often confuse Naomi Klein, author of books that attack corporations and climate change, with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, but now turned right-wing conspiracy theorist. There’s even a moment where Klein talks about earlier confusions with Naomi Campbell, a Black British model who does not, in fact, write books about corporate power or the climate crisis.

However, given that Naomi Klein wrote this book, it is not a comedy. Instead, Klein uses the confusion with Wolf to talk about the mirror world of the title, the one that Wolf now lives in, creating and perpetuating a reality that is similar to the real world, but different in dangerous ways. Klein talks about how she and Wolf have fairly similar concerns: the rise of technology and the companies that monitor and misuse their creations; global organizations that make decisions that overrule the concerns of people within independent nations; governments who use crises and catastrophes to change policies their citizens would never support otherwise. Wolf, though, takes those ideas and produces conspiracy theories with no basis in fact, sharing them online and on Steve Bannon’s productions.

Klein makes it clear that the primary difference between her work and Wolf’s work is the diligent research and fact-checking that goes into what Klein produces. That approach means that Klein is open to information that can change her mind, unlike Wolf and those like her. While Klein doesn’t spend as much time on former President Trump as she could, it’s clear that he and his supporters are who she’s trying to explain, through the lens of Wolf. Ultimately, Klein argues that all of the mirroring that goes on prevents people from seeing themselves and others clearly. Her book tries to cut through that to help readers understand a world they would never experience otherwise.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Tangled in Vow & Beseech by Jill McCabe Johnson

Review by Jami Macarty

Tangled in Vow and Beseech by Jill McCabe Johnson book cover image

In Tangled in Vow & Beseech, Jill McCabe Johnson tangles with self as daughter, sister, mother, survivor, and poet; with an “unpredictable series / of geometries” in relationship with an intimate partner; with the “the weight / of weep and want and regret” of the most pressing socio-political issues of our contemporary time. The poet allows her speaker to get real about “another mass / moment” of gun violence, those “who fell in the path / of xenophobia,” “the silencing of women,” and the dangers of “indifference.”

While the poet “sit[s] with” the consequential and holds others to account, she assumes her ethical responsibilities as a citizen and an artist, insisting that the personal includes the public. Perhaps this collective of “all-too-human / foibles” accounts for McCabe Johnson’s poems being “leashed to form.”

In some cases, the poet determines form by the poem’s content. For instance, the poem “Boxed In” uses vertical lines to erect walls around horizontal textual lines, thereby boxing in the text: “| if I typed with an eye | toward balance | maybe each poem could carve a window | or box.” Received forms, such as the abecedarian, acrostic, apostrophe, elegy, epistle, and nocturne, claim space among poems that act as a “Travel Journal” and press release. The handful of contrapuntal poems, scattered throughout the book, offer readers multiple meaning combinations. The gesture of multiple possibilities of meaning makes sense because, throughout the collection, McCabe Johnson reaches beyond the unary and binary.

With her “eye | toward balance” and inclusion, Jill McCabe Johnson “breaks the bones of what we know. Resets them” to offer readers Tangled in Vow & Beseech, a book of both the “jurisdiction of the past” and an “edict of hope” for the future.

Tangled in Vow & Beseech by Jill McCabe Johnson. MoonPath Press, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt

Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt book cover image

Good Different is a stunning novel-in-verse narrated by Selah, a 13-year-old girl struggling to act normal amidst an onslaught of feelings (as all 13-year-olds are, but they do not know that).

The metaphor of the dragon carried throughout the book works on several levels: to embody Selah’s emotional state, as one struggles inside her; as a strike against social norms, as seen in her rule set (“Don’t talk about dragons too much”); and as a symbol of difference that’s powerful and cool.

A turning point in the story comes when Selah attends a Fantasy Convention where she encounters others embracing dragon art, dragon lure, and living life on the autism spectrum. Selah goes online and finds much to learn about herself and others, tools to assist with the impinging world, and a brave new word: accommodations. The scene with her school hallway lined with poetry brought me to tears.

Empathy can be taught, and in showing (not telling) how different can be awesome, this book is a welcome lesson. There should be a copy of this book in all middle/elementary school classrooms and libraries. As Selah says:

I am full
of possibilities—
I can do more
than just hide

Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt. Scholastic Press, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently, I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle prizewinner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Book Review :: A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be by Marieke Bigg

A Scarab Where The Heart Should Be by Marieke Bigg book cover image

Review by Jennifer Brough

When an obsessive ‘starchitect’ moves into a remote glass house, her governing architectonic principles start to shatter. In the eye of a self-created cancellation storm, protagonist Jacky “The Beetle” McKenzie’s attempts to maintain a ‘streamlined’ existence become increasingly difficult. As she pinballs between ‘inflated confidence and immobilizing insecurity; the two logical poles of her world order,’ her partners struggle to magnetize her unyielding vision. Where Mark only supports Jacky as her obstinate, successful persona, Clarissa, her secondary partner, encourages her to inhabit the grey space between these poles.

The novel offers an intimate character study that effortlessly flows between the inner voices in this claustrophobic, triangulated relationship. While Mark and Clarissa are a well-drawn supporting cast, one can sense Bigg reveling in the humor of Jacky’s unpalatability. Yet, however unpleasant her protagonist appears while interacting with others, she is far more complex than an ‘unlikable female character.’

Jacky desperately falters towards growth but the reader is compelled to see the journey, particularly when, at one point, she sartorially becomes ‘the Beetle’ that the media nickname her. A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be is a fast-paced meditation on obsessive ‘genius,’ cancel culture, and the push-pull between intimacy and compromise.

A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be by Marieke Bigg. Dead Ink, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer and workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in Ache Magazine, Eunoia Review, SICK Magazine, Artsy, Barren Magazine, among others. Jennifer is writing her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain and was shortlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize’s Best Single Poem 2023.

Book Review :: Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Throughout Mengestu’s writing career, he has created characters who have trouble connecting with others, who have some sort of distance from others and themselves. Usually, that breakdown in relationships comes from their lack of recognition of the trauma they’ve suffered, frequently from their experience as refugees or immigrants.

Someone Like Us, his latest novel is no different, as he tells the story of Mamush, a journalist living in Paris with his wife Hannah, with whom he has a young son. However, Mamush spends almost the entire novel traveling to Washington, DC, where he grew up, reflecting on his life with his mother and Samuel, a father figure who might also be his father.

Mamush and Hannah’s marriage is on the verge of collapsing. Their son suffers from some ailment that has sapped his energy and seems to be taking his life from him. Whenever Mamush leaves home, Hannah wonders if he will come back. Similarly, Mamush’s career as a journalist has effectively ended. He became known for writing stories about immigrants from Africa, but those stories were always about tragedies that happened to them, not successes they had.

Samuel and Mamush’s mother have a complicated past that involves living in Europe, as well as Chicago, where they both were arrested, before moving to Washington, DC. However, neither of them will talk about it, and Mamush is unable to discover what happened. Like Mamush, Samuel seems incapable of building true relationships.

Near the end of the novel, Mengestu merges the past and present, questioning even the reliability of the story Mamush and Samuel have been telling. When one has been through trauma, stories become unreliable, but they also become the only thing one has to hold onto. Mengestu gives the reader one more such story, leaving it open to the reader to find hope in the midst of loss.

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu. Alfred A. Knopf, July 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: US Constitution 101 by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone

US Constitution 101 by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In US Constitution 101: From the Bill of Rights to the Judicial Branch, Everything You Need to Know about the Constitution of the United States, authors Richey and Paccone, both teachers, provide readers with a concise, anecdotally rich account of how America’s most foundational document evolved to become “the world’s oldest, functioning written Constitution.” Influenced by Hammurabi’s Code in Mesopotamia, the Greek system of demokratia, and the European Magna Carta, US founders struggled to create unity among the original 13 colonies while simultaneously granting each locale some autonomy. This pattern persists today (seen, for example, in the diverse state abortion laws that followed the 2022 Dobbs decision and in policies that govern the voting rights of convicted felons.)

Eighteenth-century contention is writ large throughout the book – regarding immigration, slavery, women’s suffrage, taxation, and declarations of war — and showcases the compromises and concessions of James Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Moreover, tensions over ratification of the newly-drawn Constitution, which required approval by nine states, are palpably reported and readers become privy to arguments between those who favored federal cohesion and those who favored state’s rights. Accommodation, Richey and Paccone write, “to ensure that none of the branches of government can gain a decisive advantage over the others,” led to a bicameral legislature, with strict policies regarding Presidential veto power and the appointment of federal judges, cabinet members, and ambassadors.

In addition, coverage of church-state separation, freedom of speech and assembly, prior restraint of media, and gun rights give the book added heft and contemporary relevance. What’s more, a smattering of fun facts enliven the prose: Readers learn that gerrymandering, for one, is named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose administration created a salamander-shaped district that critics dubbed the gerrymander. Who knew?

US Constitution 101 is an entertaining and extremely-readable resource, a guide to US governance for middle school and older readers. It answers a host of questions and explains the rationale for the state-by-state patchwork that makes many policies both complex and varied.

US Constitution 101: From the Bill of Rights to the Judicial Branch, Everything You Need to Know about the Constitution of the United States by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone. Adams Media, Simon & Schuster, September, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: fox woman get out! by India Lena González

fox woman get out! by India Lena González book cover image

India Lena González’s debut fox woman get out! is a poetry collection of “restless mourning,” seeking a “salve” to the “stopping up [of] spirit.”

What has stopped up the poet’s spirit has to do with America and the country’s sociocultural demands that she prove “where to place [her]self” and perform her identity as una parda, one of “the mixed bloods whose ancestries could almost never be accurately described.” The poet turns those demands on their head and acts out an exorcism of the “gold-toothed hag that is America” instead.

To “rez rrrrr e k t” herself, González uses drama-based and poetic intervention. First, the poet calls to be “heard out.” This reader willingly took my seat in the “audience.” Second, the poet calls in her matriarchal and patriarchal ancestors—her “planets”—to guide and help her “get [her] words right” for both her and her family. Third, she tears herself “wide open,” “showing [her] wounds.”

As the scenes of what González calls her “magnum opus” unfold, she seeks to “beat the / out-west-fragility” and the “being-a-woman business” “out of” herself, thereby “wash[ing] the beasts off” and “shaking [off] the trauma.” According to González’s healing wisdom, if there is to be “beginning again,” “first the old must go out.”

Yet, one of the remnants of “the old” may linger, revealing itself in the poet’s “assuming” that “reader(s)” would get “lost” in Fox Woman’s cosmos or be suspicious of her “big A” authenticity. This reader wondered if this “assuming” was evidence of anxiety about being accepted and therefore ongoing trauma. America may not change, but the poet does. This reader followed “sparks of divinity” as India Lena González gave “birth” to her words on the page, “building” and “shaping anew // world.”

India Lena González’s fox woman get out! is medicine poetry.

fox woman get out! by India Lena González. BOA Editions, LTD, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Alternatives—Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel—begins with four chapters that follow four sisters going about their daily lives. Those lives are disrupted when Olwin, the eldest, leaves her family in the middle of the night and goes missing. The rest of the novel focuses on the three sisters finding Olwin and having conversations—or avoiding conversations—about who they are and what they value, often through accusations as much as confessions.

Their parents died when they were teenagers, a death that shaped them all in quite different ways, offering readers at least one meaning of Hughes’s title. Olwin raises them after their parents’ deaths, which is partly why her disappearance bothers the other sisters even more than one might expect. Rather than simply finding out that she is still alive and doing well, for example, they all converge on her to have a sort of intervention. It’s during those moments in the novel when the reader finds out more about their childhood and their parents’ deaths, as they each view that time in their life differently, yet another meaning of the title.

Hughes’s structure mirrors the dramatic stakes of the novel by literally shifting into dramatic form. When the sisters have found Olwin, Hughes twice shifts to writing the novel as if it were a play, as they discover more about each other as they are now and how they view their pasts. Such an approach doesn’t lose the characters’ interior thoughts, though, as Hughes allows those thoughts to appear in what one would typically see as stage directions. As with life, Hughes doesn’t leave her characters with closure; instead, they try to forge some semblance of a life out of the struggles they all face. As we all do, they will do the best they can.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes. Riverhead Books, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Reviews :: The Privateers by Josh Cowen

The Privateers by Josh Cowan book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen’s The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers is a potent indictment of the role school vouchers play in undermining public education. It’s a timely, insightful, and enraging book.

Cowen reports that the push for vouchers – which enable children to attend private schools with public dollars – began in 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education was decided. Fearful of court-ordered school desegregation, a slew of white parents sought ways to keep their children out of mixed classrooms. They were soon aided by racist legislators and theorists, including economist Milton Friedman, who helped them strategize. As fears about public school safety ramped up, their efforts picked up speed with eleven states currently providing universal school vouchers to any family that wants them.

That number, Cowen writes, is likely to rise.

This, despite the program’s consistent failure to prepare kids for academic progress – as measured by standardized test scores. But low grades don’t faze voucher proponents, a deeply connected network of donors (the Bradley, DeVos, Koch, Walton, and Olin funds) that dovetail with conservative political groups (The Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute), grassroots community activists, and professors from prestigious universities. All favor privatized education as well as book bans, censored curricula, and the enactment of anti-LGBTQIA policies.

Cowen’s analysis of how vouchers have fed into this broader conservative agenda makes it essential reading for supporters of public education. If being forewarned allows us to be forearmed, The Privateers elucidates the many challenges ahead and suggests ways to successfully resist the right’s game plan.

The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers by Josh Cowen. Harvard Education Press, September, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Real Americans by Rachel Khong book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Real Americans, Rachel Khong’s second novel, follows three generations, beginning with the middle one. The first section tells of Lily’s life as a second-generation Chinese immigrant, as she tries to make a life in New York. She has an unpaid internship and a stereotypically small apartment until she meets Matthew, a tall, handsome, extremely wealthy, white man, an encounter that changes their lives. They get married, and Lily gives birth to Nico, the focus of the second section of the book.

He grows up on an island off the coast of Washington State with only his mother, going by the name of Nick. While he loves his mother, he also longs to escape the claustrophobic life of the island, ultimately leading him to attend college at Yale, even though he doesn’t feel he fits in there. He also struggles with his identity, as his mother is of Chinese heritage and he can speak Chinese, but he looks as white as his father, including his blue eyes. He reconnects with his father and begins to learn why his mother left, leading him to try to understand who he truly is, so he can craft his own life.

The final section’s focus is on May, Nick’s grandmother, providing the reader with more background on the family, helping to explain the actions and reactions that have led to Nick’s life. Underneath the family dynamics—the core of the novel—there is a larger ethical question that the contemporary world will have to deal with in the coming years, though I don’t want to give that aspect of the novel away.

Even without that issue, Khong clearly explores how parents try to do what is best for their children, how children misunderstand those actions, how parents sometimes make mistakes, and how children sometimes forgive them and sometimes don’t.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong. Alfred A. Knopf, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn

Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn book cover image

In her fourth collection, Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn brings necessary attention to the profound vulnerabilities and strengths of women and girls in a dangerous “American landscape.” With “keys between … fingers in a parking lot,” Frischkorn’s poems confront male violence against females, and they indict a “sex-trafficker pedophile,” “frat boys [who] pick off freshmen girls,” and physical, sexual, and emotional forms of family and intimate partner abuse. In this landscape, “it’s all dire.”

Frischkorn’s speaker tells us she is daughter of a father who “tried to drown [her] in his bottle of sorrows” and a mother who “had no stint of empathy / for any living thing.” Under these circumstances, a reader may wonder, as one poem does, “what did sorrow ever do?” These poems assert that sorrow can prompt honest expression, different choices, and foster change. The daughter’s “greatest // achievement was to shatter / the dysfunction [of her] parents.”

Bad things happen to girls and women in the forest, but not in these poems. “This is not a fairy tale.” Hurrah! Instead, the forest offers “detail of light and shade,” where our speaker takes solace among trees, and where “Like Thoreau alone // in the distant woods [she] come[s] to her[self].”

Out of that recovery comes a desire “to pay tribute to the promise / of the future” which requires allegiance to both the “ancestral forest” and the next generation. Here is a poet who fights for her freedom, protests “deforest, // to develop,” and strives to be the “kind / of mother— / to gift [her] child / endurance and steady pace.”

In Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn uses language to cut in two ways—beyond the imperiled and “beyond the veil.”

Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn. Anhinga Press, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Three Melissas by Nilan and Bowman

The Three Melissas: The Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness by Diane Nilan and Diana Bowman book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 30 percent of unhoused Americans are children and their caretakers. And while every school district is mandated by federal law to address the needs of kids living in shelters, doubled-or-tripled up, in cars, or on the streets, The Three Melissas underscores the learning challenges that result from housing precarity.

The Three Melissas: The Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness, a self-help manual for those navigating extreme poverty, was written by long-time advocates Diane Nilan and Diana Bowman for the unhoused, but it centers on the experiences of three women named Melissa. One lost her home after fleeing domestic abuse, another was evicted after becoming too ill to work, and the third lost her home in a hurricane.

They’re a sympathetic trio, and this slim volume provides a firsthand account of how they’ve accessed school resources, shared space, and found nutritious food, seasonally appropriate clothing, culturally sensitive medical and psychiatric care, and permanent shelter. But unhoused individuals are not the only readers who will benefit from their strategies: Social workers, teachers, school administrators, medical staff, and other ‘helping professionals’ will get an up-close introduction to the indignities that follow the loss of a home and the difficulties of navigating often-callous bureaucracies. Complete with recommendations for lawmakers, The Three Melissas also suggest numerous policy shifts to benefit undomiciled families.

The Three Melissas: The Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness by Diane Nilan and Diana Bowman. Charles Bruce Foundation, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Kursid Kids by Ronan Russell and Pat LaMarche

Kursid Kids by Ronan Russell book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], the Kursid family are in a downward spiral. After breadwinner Koal loses his job, he, his wife, and three kids are evicted from their home. Despair forces them to take shelter in the woods, and as they try to evade the authorities something miraculous happens: a magic cat enters their lives and grants the two older kids special powers.

As a result, Winter, the oldest, can now morph between a human boy and a flying-swimming creature capable of hearing the area’s iron-handed ruler strategize about jailing the adults and breaking up the family. His sister, seven-year-old Pearl, has been given a different ability; to date, she has been able to warm even the coldest of hearts by a touch of her hand. But will this work on a greedy Magnate eager to make an example of the Kursids? It’s tense set-up and is left unresolved in this second of three intertwined books. (The first was released in 2022; the publication date of the third has not been disclosed.)

The books, written by a grandson and grandmother, weave a social justice fantasy into the harsh realities of class inequality. It’s a compassionate introduction to the day-to-day struggles of homeless families.

For readers 13 and older. All proceeds benefit the Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project.

Kursid Kids: Winter Turns [Book Two], Creative author, Ronan Russell; Technical author, Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Aron Rook. Charles Bruce Foundation, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil

Glitter Road by January Gill O'Neil book cover image

Review by Lauren Crawford

Glitter Road, January Gill O’Neil’s most recent poetry collection, is about change. The poems tell the story of a speaker entering new chapters in her life after the loss of her life partner. Part of that new chapter illustrates her adventures and the exploration of her new identity on new soil: The South.

So many Southern voices, cultures and influences fill these pages. There, change is everywhere: “Here’s the nadir of our suffering, which started in one place to end in another.” We are called to the attention of the South’s gruesome past with racism and division, and Gill does not shy away from braiding culture shock and a land littered with a violent history against a backdrop of Mississippi landscape, the river often speaking in metaphor to the possibilities of change, even for the South itself.

We also bear witness to the change in family; the speakers’ relationship with her young children, as well as another chance at romance with a new, budding love. O’Neil describes the Southern landscape as “A repository for memory preserving a shared moment as when two people have loved each other well the topography transforms, diverges over time, cleaves a clearer path to where it was always meant to go.” And what a gentle, intimate way of writing how to embrace change in an unfamiliar land, and perhaps even how to leave the door open for more.

Glitter Road by January Gill O’Neil. CavenKerry Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, third place winner of the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Award, and the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award. Her debut collection, Catch & Release, is forthcoming in 2025 with Cornerstone Press as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Portage Poetry Series. Her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, Prime Number Magazine, SoFloPoJo, The Florida Review, Red Ogre Review, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves as the assistant poetry editor for Alan Squire Publishing. Twitter @LaurenCraw4d

Book Review :: American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In American Scapegoat, Enzo Silon Surin’s second full-length collection of poetry, the poet writes from a weightiness of being a Haitian-born immigrant to America and the “weight of the wait” for the country to fully reckon with its history of violence and injustice.

“if you’re black, like me, and were born
mourning your rotations around the sun,
you’re a full breath closer to the grave.”

Enzo Silon Surin takes on the myth, ethos, and pathos of America in his poems, and he pulls no punches. Nor should he. There is necessity in bringing to language for readers what the Black body experiences “when / it is being / sized up.” What those persecuted “felt,” the manner of their deaths, whether bullets, rope, or a knee to the neck, must be told. The poet is “writing in the hope that you will care about [his] early / demise, enough to be moved by how often [he] find[s] [him]self on [his] / knees.

Parts “appeal,” testimony, “vigil,” and sermon, Enzo Silon Surin is “in search of something whole and tender.” He “rebel[s] against the Union / by putting” a “felt-tip” pen in his hands and making “black characters” live again in the movies and in our collective “memory.” Enzo Silon Surin writes their “name[s]” and claims his among poets.

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin. Black Lawrence Press, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Book Review :: Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Dog and Monsters by Mark Haddon book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The eight short stories in Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon’s latest collection, run the gamut between the touching and the creepy. Most are adaptations of well-known tales: The Myth of the Minotaur; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; Zeus’ granting of eternal life, but not eternal youth, to his daughter’s mortal lover; and the suffering of St. Anthony the Great, among them.

In this contemporary retelling, Haddon interrogates important themes including maternal love, sexuality, religious devotion, fear, the cruelty of teenagers, bias against the disabled, and lust.

“St. Brides Bay” introduces a divorced woman whose role in her daughter’s wedding brings up a series of what-ifs about her own partnership choices. It’s a poignant, stinging reflection on the road not taken. Similarly, “The Mother’s Story” addresses maternal love for a disabled son, a child who is scorned by his community and rejected by his father. Like the king’s wife in the story of the Minotaur, gossip about the child’s lineage persists, isolating the pair. Whether love is enough to sustain them remains an open question.

As the title suggests, dogs play a role in many of the tales. But they are not always humankind’s best friends. Indeed, the boundaries between humans and animals are often murky as they serve as both savior and antagonist.

Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon. Doubleday, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton

Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Sally Ashton’s fifth book Listening to Mars offers readers “thought experiments otherwise known as poems” while “trying to understand” the COVID-19 health crisis, which brought with it death, uncertainty, anxiety, social upheaval, and political protest. Across the globe, “People began to die” or were “separated” from their families while “shelves emptied” and “we were forced to watch the execution of an innocent man in slow motion, over and over.” In other words, “the really big tragedies [of] these days.”

Conjuring “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by St. John of the Cross, and “In a Dark Time,” by Theodore Roethke, Ashton endeavors to “make sense of a dark time” via a Sci-Fi space curiosity. Imagining life on Mars seems to offer artistic escape to the poet, while calling out billionaires’ plots for a “backup planet” bolsters the purpose of her expression. In the moon’s waxing “curve,” a welcomed companionship; the “Stay-at-home orders to ‘flatten the curve’” a source of “panic.” The poems centering on celestial spheres in the Milky Way Galaxy act like points on orbital planes beaming attention back to Earth. The gravity of the situation on Earth is inescapable.

Planetary health and human anguish are also suggested in Ashton’s go-to poetic forms: the monostich and prose paragraphs. The spacious singular lines and dense text blocks suggest the themes and thematic tensions of the poems. The monostiches enact isolation, alienation, and lacunae; prose poems evoke connection, extension, and protest (of form). The collection also includes haibun and “haiku-ish” expressions. These Japanese-derived forms offer lyric qualities adept at managing grief and important to balancing “present danger” in the poems. The “sad trombone” and “highs of panic” brightened by “glints of light.”

Ultimately, the poet seeks “words that make the world look like what it feels like.” In a dark time, Sally Ashton finds her “way with a pen.”

Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton. Cornerstone Press, February 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The main plot of The Spoiled Heart, Sunjeev Sahota’s latest novel, follows Nayan Olak as he campaigns for General Secretary of Unify, a British trade union he has been a member of since he began working. However, his campaign receives a stronger-than-expected challenge from Megha Sharma, a DEI officer who has worked there for roughly a year.

They represent two different approaches to race, though both are of Indian descent, largely due to their class differences: Nayan’s parents struggled financially, while Megha comes from inherited wealth, which she has chosen to turn her back on. Nayan wants Unify to be color-blind, to focus on all working people’s needs, regardless of race, while Megha believes that race and racism matter as much as class, if not more, leading the reader to explore the land-mined terrain of identity politics in a diverse Britain in the twenty-first century.

Further complicating Nayan’s life is the return of a writer he knew when they were children, Sajjan Dhanoa. They didn’t know each other well, and Sajjan left the area to go to college, rarely returning. In looking for an idea for a new book, Sajjan begins telling Nayan’s story, not only the campaign, but the death of Nayan’s mother and son in a purposeful fire at his parents’ store nearly twenty years before.

Nayan begins dating Helen and helping her son Brandon, though the reader ultimately discovers Helen, as well as Sajjan’s family, know more about Nayan’s losses than they’re saying. Because Sajjan narrates much of the story, relying on various people’s accounts, Sahota is also calling into question the validity of narrative, an idea reinforced through one of Megha and Nayan’s main confrontations. While the reader may understand exactly what happened, they won’t know exactly why, as even the characters are unsure of their motives, much like people in real life.

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota. Viking, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools

The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools edited by Royel M. Johnson and Shaun R. Harper addresses the ways that the U.S. right-wing has distorted and manipulated facts about how history and culture are taught.

This thirteen-essay collection harkens back to 2019 when scholar Nikole Hannah Jones launched the 1619 Project, a multimedia effort highlighting enslaved people’s vital contributions to U.S. economic and social development.

Not everyone was pleased with this message and white conservatives and Christian nationalists wasted no time in attempting to mute its impact as an educational tool: Since January 2021, eighteen states have passed limits on public school teaching – pre-K to university level – about race and racism. Gender, gender identity, and ways to fight oppression have also captured attention – and have been similarly banned. In addition to legislative attacks, the backlash has spawned “parents’ rights” groups to oppose student exposure to Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms.

But why all this momentum?

As The Big Lie makes clear, few educators teach this material. Moreover, the anthology challenges the idea that lessons about race or gender are “divisive” and contests the notion that such topics cause white (and male) students to experience “reverse discrimination.” This anti-racist and pro-democracy perspective makes the book essential reading for activists, teachers, researchers, and students.

The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools edited by Royel M. Johnson and Shaun R. Harper. Harvard Education Press, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce

Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce book cover image

Review by Jennifer Brough

Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Ponce’s debut Blood Red is a rush of a novel that charts a 38-year-old unnamed woman’s unravelling. She skates through a city full of drugs, sex, and friendship, desperate to avoid looming life-changing decisions and a skin-picking compulsion that has haunted her since childhood.

In the midst of a rocky divorce, the narrator flits between casual lovers. Her regular hook-up lives in a cave-like apartment, where the walls appear as muddied vines pulsing under peeling pink paint. As her inner conflict spirals, Ponce uses color to demonstrate the fracturing between the body’s boundaries, with the ‘softness’ of her character’s inner self (white) that threatens to spill over and against the world’s forceful, hardened outer shell (red). Pain and pleasure are a hair’s width apart, creating a discomforting middle ground when these opposites converge in sexual encounters, memories, and vivid hallucinations.

Booker delivers a seamless translation that sweeps us along in this vortex, effortlessly layering the narrator’s deceptive cynical tone with the fragile stream-of-consciousness underpinning it. Ponce pushes her character to the brink of a visceral internal void, leaving the reader akin to the narrator in ‘trying to embrace the untouchable or unnamable’ experience of this mercurial text.

Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce; Translated by Sarah Booker. Dead Ink, January 2024 (Restless Books, 2022).

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer and workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in Ache Magazine, Eunoia Review, SICK Magazine, Artsy, Barren Magazine, among others. Jennifer is writing her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain and was shortlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize’s Best Single Poem 2023.

Book Review :: Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry

Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

I don’t always read front matter, but with Ben Terry’s Near Where the Blood Pools: A Novel in Verse, I’m glad I did. There’s a character list organized around Cephas, older brother to Hope, a young girl who disappears. The cast includes Memphis, a Seer; Church ladies; and a can of ashes. I was intrigued.

In the author’s note, Terry illustrates a span of roughly twelve years before and after Hope’s disappearance: Hope Exists — Losing Hope — Hope Gone — What Remains

Calling attention to the timeframe of each poem requires readers to mind where each speaker is along this path. In addition to Hope’s family, treasure hunters trawl old pig farms. Bones sing. Menfolk go to jail.

Terry is currently incarcerated; his poems about prison are pithy and authentic. The reader frequently stumbles over exquisite lines, such as: “Memphis parted his lips to speak / and from them poured coal / and ash and water and time.” And from Marl Mae: “Everything good gets taken. / That’s history straightening up / before the future arrives.”

In a novel in verse, the few words on each page must develop character, place, and plot. It’s a tall challenge. Ben Terry succeeds.

Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry. Livingston Press, July 2024.

Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle prizewinner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Book Review :: The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman

The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, Shechtman’s lengthy title and subtitle might make readers think they know what they’re getting when they open her book, but they would be mistaken. While the crossword puzzle is certainly one of Shechtman’s interests, there is much more going on here, for good and ill, depending on what readers are looking for.

If one wants the focus to remain on crossword puzzles, she has an interesting perspective, given that she published her first New York Times crossword puzzle when she was nineteen, and given that she is female. Despite the male-dominated landscape of the CrossWorld today, Shechtman points out several important women who helped shape the development of the puzzle. Similarly, she points out the continued sexism of that CrossWorld, not merely in the fact that most puzzle creators are male, but in the clues and solutions one would see.

If the reader is only looking for a book on crossword puzzles, though, they’ll be disappointed to find that Shechtman spends only about half the book, at best, on that area. Instead, she has written what she refers to near the end of the book as a “memoir wrapped in a cultural history.” The memoir aspect of this book centers around her struggles with anorexia, connecting that to her fascination with crossword puzzles. This part of the book also pulls heavily from feminist theoreticians and Freudian analysis, as Shechtman uses both of those approaches to understand who and how she is. Those sections might push a reader looking for a history of crossword puzzles.

That said, the combination largely works. Shechtman clearly lays out the connections between gender and crosswords and anorexia, helping readers to see how she puzzled her way through her life, in more ways than one.

The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle by Anna Shechtman. HarperOne, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer

The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The folk music scene of the 1960s through 1990s is as much a character in The Singer Sisters as the many members of the large family whose struggles and conflicts it chronicles. They’re a diverse lot and include once-popular singer Judie Zingerman, her daughter Emma, son Leon, ex-husband Dave Cantor, and sister Sylvia, the other half of the renowned Singer Sisters.

As the story unfolds, generational conflicts emerge and long-held family secrets begin the rise to the surface. The result is a rich and complicated multi-tiered family story, in which bonds are repeatedly tested but never completely unravel. This makes the novel an intergenerational love story, with wholly believable characters whose flaws and insecurities are writ large.

Issues of reproductive justice are skillfully woven into the story, and the political milieu of the times becomes an important, but subtle, backdrop for what is revealed. This is a story about the big stuff – life, death, career aspirations, sexual agency, parenting – but all are handled with a light enough touch to make this a debut to savor.

In addition, insight into what it takes to be a successful musician, the constant travel, the frayed relationships, and the pressure to keep audiences engaged and entertained add heft to the book. Highly recommended.

The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer. Flatiron Books, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.