NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Poet Kate Fadick (who uses the pronouns “they, them, their”) has written a compact and thematically focused chapbook of poems inspired by the life of the German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard died in 1179 but remains remarkable for her ecological/cosmological mysticism as well as her achievements in music, theology, languages, playwriting, natural science and botany. Fadick, who only began writing poetry in their late 60’s, is the author of a previous chapbook of poems, Slipstream, published by Finishing Line Press in March, 2013.

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“I was made // to be good like this, a father / before I was done being my father’s / son.” -from “Tracheotomy”

While most of the nation is wrangling over politics, some poets, like Craig Morgan Teicher, are reminding us of our human fragility in this pandemonium of voices. Poets like Teicher are forced by circumstance to cultivate a stillness of spirit for fear of inhaling or exhaling too carelessly and thereby breaking the already frayed cord of life struggling to hold itself together—that frayed cord being the speaker’s son so consciously observed in this 88-page manuscript of poems, The Trembling Answers.

 

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Some Bore Gifts is a fantastical take on the inner workings on the average person’s conscious mind. It is clear A.G. Harmon is precise and specific when it comes to each and every detail that he either includes or omits. The precise attention to detail and the playfulness applied to the everyday character in these stories will enchant and affect each and every person that flips through its pages.

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TJ Beitelman’s Communion is unlike any collection before it. The stories are written in pairs that, like the body and blood of actual Communion, are strikingly different in form, but very similar in underlying meaning. Beitelman’s stylistic approach showcases his mastery of multiple genres. Some of the stories resemble flash fiction or prose, while others resemble free-standing short stories or chapters in a book. One thing is for sure, Communion will trouble its readers in the most memorable of ways.

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Nearly 20 years ago, I was a 19-year old community college student introduced to Keith Taylor’s work via his slim volume of very short stories, Life Science and Other Stories. Since then, I have associated Taylor’s work with a special kind of mindfulness. It does seem redundant to call any poet’s work mindful, really, but his newest book The Bird-while provided me with a more precise way of defining Taylor’s attention . . .

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Jane Alison masterfully constructs an interiority unlike anything before in her novel Nine Island. The prose used in this novel is experimental, lyrical, and poetic. Alison takes the reader on a journey with an aging woman living in solitude with only the company of her cat. The story is constructed in such a way that the reader has no choice but to ride each and every intimate wave that splashes over the page.

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You may not have heard of conceptual artist Walter De Maria, but if you’re curious like me, you’ll want to know more about him and his career after reading Laura Raicovich’s book-length essay, At the Lightning Field.

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“The proper study / of monkey-kind is man, / and the true study / of man is shenanigans.” So writes the playful, keen-eyed and accomplished poet John Skoyles in the poem “Evolutionary Shenanigans” from his fourth book of poetry, Inside Job. Inside Job is divided into three untitled sections, and the poems run the gamut from the autobiographical to sketches of literary figures like Jorge Luis Borges and Grace Paley.

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If you at times find yourself (as I often do) feeling a bit bummed out by the overproduction of postmodern, fragmentary poems that deliberately eschew narrative elements of storytelling, a self or subject, and/or any sense of purpose and closure, then do yourself a favor and pick up Matt Schumacher’s Ghost Town Odes. This is an ambitious book of poetry seeking to narrate tales of tribulation and triumph in the Old West, particularly in Oregon, the state the author currently calls home.

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Spree MacDonald writes without punctuation in Milksop Codicil, conscious of the placement of the words, lines, and stanzas on each page and how they interact with space to produce meaning. The effect is attention to images and how they interact independent of grammatical constraint.

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Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline opens with a strong voice in the first poem, “Reupholstering a Chair,” that urges one to “look up from the base of your life.” This perspective continues to play a central role in all the poems in this chapbook; the voice remains strong throughout each piece, even (or especially) those that deal with difficult subjects of loss, shame, violence, love, and death. With the final poem, “Machine for Second Chances,” there is hope in a “machine that makes / meaning, like stardust,” and strength to navigate “the footholds steep / & the footholds careless,” as “we step into our lives.”

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Once, a hundred years ago, the tornado
was a young man being pulled along
by the Missouri River while his friends
laughed, then called, then screamed, then
went silent . . . .  — “On the Origins of the Tornado”

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Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor is full of big questions: Where do we come from? What is our origin? What is family? What is change? What are our fetal dreams? What is an orphan? Why is adoptee not recognized in the plural? Were we born to love? Can the whole world see me all at once? What is a foreigner? Was Antigone the first cyborg?

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With great erudition and a fine eye for the lyric, Janice N. Harrington’s Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin is an essential biographical reflection which traces the life of one of America’s most underrated painters. Horace H. Pippin, born in Pennsylvania in 1888, fought in WWI in France. After being injured by a German sniper, he returned to The United States to paint.

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One should think of reading Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods as a welcome to West Virginia. Sixty-three West Virginians fill this anthology with vivid poetry and fiction that serve to characterize their “wild and wonderful” state.

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Perhaps one of the most difficult things about being a writer is knowing how you’re supposed to go about being a writer. Pretty close to the front of Kendra Levin’s The Hero Is You, she says, “Many books and writing programs place so much emphasis on craft, they neglect one of the most challenging aspects of writing: how to go about actually getting the words from your brain onto the page on a regular basis.” This book is, naturally then, trying not to be a book about craft, but rather one about establishing healthy work patterns.

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Rosalie Moffett won The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize with her debut collection of poetry titled June in Eden. In this, her prize-winning book, Moffett shapes original ideas into poems that reflect her interest in family, science and technology. It’s dedicated to her mother and father, and they’re featured throughout.

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Who was this 19th century Czech woman that Kelcey Parker Ervick writes about in her book, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová? And why, she wonders, hadn’t she previously heard about this woman who is so famous in Europe? I also wondered why I’d never heard of her. In checking with friends in Prague, I discovered that Němcová was indeed a cherished figure who is introduced to school children and is still held in esteem almost two centuries later. In fact, she’s pictured on the Czech 500 koruna bill.

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Poet Jason Allen is a poetical pyromaniac who guides his readers through a tour of hell involving scenes of addiction, suicide, homelessness, and family dysfunction. And even if we are tempted to withdraw from such smoldering carnage, ruin and rubble, Allen reminds us that “while we sleep, our worst nightmares / continue happening to someone else.” The thing is though, the poems in this debut collection are a controlled burn. The fire never gets out of hand, which is the mark of a skilled verbal arsonist. Paraphrasing William Wordsworth: a more amateur poet would have left too much spontaneous overflow of emotion in these pages without the necessary distance needed to craft the poems as they are “recollected in tranquility.”

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Jaimee Wriston Colbert has created an incredible connection between the endangered nature of humans and the environment around them. Wild Things is a collection of linked stories that showcase desperation and heartbreak felt by both humans and animals, and the landscape they are all trying to survive in. Colbert crafts a world all readers will be able to vividly picture, and that’s if they haven’t already experienced the all too true reality in each of the stories.

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Drawing on some eight hundred letters and other research documenting over two decades, Diane Simmons illuminates the unusual life of family friend, Eva Eldridge during and after WWII America. Simmons, originally neighbors and friends with Eva’s mother, Grace, when she was just a young girl, became the executor of Eva’s estate upon her death, leading her to secrets “hidden away in the arid eastern Oregon attic” of Eva’s home. Drawn by return addresses from Italy, North Africa, “somewhere in the Pacific,” and from all over America, Simmons looked past “a creepy sense of voyeurism,” grabbed a knife and cut through the “loops of tightly knotted kitchen string” that held together envelopes “collected into fat packets.”

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Over the past couple of years, more than a bit has been written about the re-emergence of the novella as a respected literary form. Given that most of us tend to be caught between a perpetual time crunch and a desire for the aspects of our lives that truly matter, it only makes sense. Shorter works are able to accommodate our constraints while providing that glimmer of the richer experience we seek. All the while, a move toward a relative minimalism has revealed that breadth does not necessarily equate with depth. Sometimes, an author’s choice to refrain from filling in all of the blanks just may allow for a more satisfying experience on the part of the reader.

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The mystifying title of this anthology—The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker—calls for an explanation, which is forthcoming in the introduction. “Here are writers claiming who they are and screaming it from the top of their lungs. They are the boneshakers. [ . . . ] Like the 19^th century bicycle prototype from which they get their name, they have no means of shock absorption.”

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The Night Could Go In Either Direction is, as the subtitle states, a conversation; a conversation between speakers, Kim Addonizio and Brittany Perham both contributing to this conversation on facing pages of this twenty-five page chapbook covered in lux pink paper that shimmers slightly in natural light. I have never read Perham, but Addonizio’s poems, quickly recognizable, are reminiscent of her collection What is This Thing Called Love. Perham’s prose poems contribute a raw symmetry to this tale of love gone wrong while Addonizio is so Addonizio, saying things that only Addonizio can say in that very Addonizio way.

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Jacob M. Appel explains the title of his mystery novel, The Mask of Sanity, by crediting psychiatrist and psychopathy pioneer Hervey Cleckley, who used the phrase as the title of his 1941 book. It referred to people who “at their cores proved incapable of feeling empathy or compassion for their fellow human beings,” writes Appel.

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Katie Hartsock’s debut full-length collection of poems is a sprightly and sophisticated exploration of its title: Bed of Impatiens. Most probably know impatiens as a species of flowering plant, which, according to some 18^th Century botanists, the flower is so named because its capsules readily burst open when touched. However, it also shares the same Latin root for the word “impatient” which has other definitions, including “eagerly desirous” and “not being able to endure.” Hartsock’s book has very little to do with a literal bed of flowers, but rather more to do with lying down in a bed of various desires that requires or inspires a restless (and lyrically fruitful) impatience.

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Mood: a vast penumbra of feelings Mary Cappello tries tirelessly at defining through the guiding light of these dynamic essays. Our moods can be both fixed and elastic, light and heavy—intractable vicissitudes that alter the course of our days and lives. They are at once ubiquitous and unexplained, and influenced by any number of things: clouds and weather, music, sweets, the connotation of words, View-Masters, taxidermy and dioramas, picture books, other people’s voices. These are among the influencers that Cappello explores in Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack.

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You are most likely going to want a dictionary on hand to fully appreciate this deeply layered book of poems. I know: this may already be a nonstarter for some readers. But persevere and the rewards are plentiful. The best kind of gift is the one that keeps on giving, and that’s what this book does. You won’t need a dictionary for the whole experience, but Amy Munson is a poet with a wise and wide vocabulary.

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Meghan Privitello is the recipient of a 2014 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and she is the author of the full-length poetry collection: A New Language for Falling Out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015). Her latest release, Notes on the End of the World, is the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition and it is an intoxicating work of art that will leave you swooning and word-drunk after you have read it. Despite being 47 pages in length, this chapbook has all the aesthetic weight of a poetry collection double its size. The book contains 20 poems sequentially titled “Day I” through “Day 20” and they are bracketed by two other poems with the same title: “Notes on the End of the World.”

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Arthur Pfister was one of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s: talented artists whose works were displayed on one-sided posters that expressed strong feelings during that chaotic decade of political and cultural unrest. In the intervening years, he has been a spoken word artist, an educator, speechwriter, and winner of the 2009 Asante Award for his book My Name is New Orleans. Eventually, Pfister began writing under the name Professor Arturo.

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Regardless of how “evolved” our literary tastes may be, it’s probably safe to say that, amid the busy-ness of our lives, we may occasionally neglect to make time (or create the headspace) for subtleties, the nuances that allow us to reach a more tender place within ourselves, a place capable of recognizing that very tenderness within others. This is precisely the reason that What She Was Saying by Marjorie Maddox is a collection meant to be read during times of stillness, as a reprieve from the dissonance and incessant clatter of the world around us, so as to prevent the story beneath the story from being lost amid the din.

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In hybrid poem essays, Literature for Nonhumans, Gabriel Gudding has taken on the system in which we live at the level of mind and body, beliefs, laws, and values by way of our effects on the nonhumans sharing this planet with us. In “the nonhumans,” besides animals, he includes rivers, mountains, wetlands, trees, landscapes, bio niches. The nonhumans are looking back at us in their own right, subjectivity given to animals and landscapes, both seen as a “who.” By the end of the book we have a coherent viewpoint of the effect of humans on life for the reader’s consideration. The book is a disorienting set of ideas that produces a cry of the heart as we look through the lens of human ensconcement blithely operating the socio-economic system with its steamroller collateral damage.

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The synopsis at the back of Monica Youn’s Blackacre, describes the poems in this collection as “treacherously lush or alluringly bleak.” And they are.

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In 1984, Phillip Lopate, then 41, recorded his mother, then 66, tell her life story for 20 hours over three months. He then put the cassette tapes in a shoe box for three decades before he transcribed them. A Mother’s Tale, is the result of this project. Lopate writes in his prologue, “I entered a triangular dialogue involving my mother, my younger self, and the person I am today.” In the final chapter, he summarizes his mother’s life and how his project fits into the larger scheme of America.

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The Mysterious Islands and Other Stories is a collection of stories that feels like dream within a dream within a nightmare. A.W. DeAnnuntis uses eloquent language and out of this realm imagery to give life to a world that that skirts back and forth between reality and imagination. The stories in this collection will leave you wondering if you can trust the sanctity of your own mind.

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If you are looking for a contemporary, kooky, relatable read, look no further than Alice Kaltman’s Staggerwing. This collection of short stories is reminiscent of that ‘I can’t remember why I walked into the room’ feeling, something everyone can relate to. The characters are original and full of life, while also exhibiting off-the-wall characteristics. Staggerwing will have you barking out a laugh as its characters attempt to look graceful while walking across a tightrope.

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Whether we view our lifetimes as a series of clearly delineated chapters, isolated incidents, developmental stages or something akin to a tangled ball of fraying yarn, the journey from our youth to the ripe weariness of middle age somehow seems to leave us mystified when we come to consider how we got from a place of such innocence and naivete to, well, here, in this room where we lie, wracked with disappointment, betrayal, disillusionment and an all-too-hefty dose of loneliness. We tend to remember the important scenes in which we were featured within the great cosmic film of life, but the connections elude us, as though the imprints from our experiences are processed only after the screen fades to black.

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Until picking up Julie Hensley’s Landfall: A Ring of Stories, I had never heard linked short story collections described as a “ring.” But Hensley’s book is exactly that, and it makes me hungry for more collections of stories so craftily connected. Taut with tension and carefully ordered, the stories follow characters as they move in and out of Conrad’s Fork, Kentucky. Landfall: A Ring of Stories makes good on its titular promise by leading the reader in a complete circle, back to the family farm where the collection begins.

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Gleah Powers counts being an actor, model, bartender and teacher of alternative therapies among her many careers. Recently, she’s chosen to add fiction writer to the list with her first novella, Edna & Luna. Powers’s writing style is peppy and easily readable as she tells the story of two diverse women whose lives intersect in the American Southwest.

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When Roselee Blooston’s husband Jerry Mosier started working as a media consultant in Dubai, she worried he might come to harm. But she never expected her 53-year-old husband to be brought down not by a threat from without, but by an aneurism in his brain.

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The holiday season brings families together, for better or worse, leading many of us to face the makeup of our identities across the dining room table. Whether it’s seeing your own mannerisms in your parents, or it’s basking in grandparents’ old stories from before you were born, we can recognize the ways in which our families have shaped our identities. In her graphic memoir, Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil explores her own identity as a granddaughter, a daughter, an artist, and a Jew.

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Obsession is a nasty beast whose claws sink deep and anchor inside its victims. Nora Gold’s book, The Dead Man, follows a heartbroken Eve Bercovitch, who has spent the last five years bleeding out in the grips of her obsession. The Dead Man straps readers into the passenger’s seat of a roller coaster ride through the world of Israeli music. Gold weaves a narrative so intricate that readers everywhere will find themselves questioning the reality of this world. Eve is the perfectly imperfect vehicle through the wild world that’s unearthed inside these pages.

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Imagine you’ve discovered a way to assassinate anyone you please, with guaranteed anonymity, and it’s as easy as a single click of a button. Maura Nelson makes this discovery in what seems to be an epiphany. This knowledge is too heavy a burden for Maura to carry alone, so she enlists the help of Jack Plymouth. Together the two of them must battle morality and sense in My Immaculate Assassin by David Huddle.

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If you’ve ever flown anywhere, you’ll identify with many of the short essays in Airplane Reading, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich. Even if you’ve never flown, it’s still worth reading for sentences like this: “A flying problem is the opposite of a drinking problem: it starts when you lose interest in the free booze.” So writes Ian Bogost in his essay “Frequent Flight.” Bogost is indeed a frequent flyer at more than 200,000 miles in a year. His piece is joined by essays from fellow travelers, including several doctors who take to the sky.

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Armando Lucas Correa’s novel The German Girl is a sad Holocaust story, one not heard before. Based on an historical tragedy, never acknowledged by the Cuban government, it nevertheless includes the names and pictures of many of the 937 passengers on the St. Louis ship, fleeing Nazi Germany, who were not allowed to disembark at Havana on May 27, 1939—nor allowed into Canada or the U.S. They had to return to Europe where England, France, Belgium and Holland each took some but by then Germany declared war and only the English refugees were safe. Before that, some passengers with precious cyanide capsules committed suicide, because so few were allowed into Cuba, where more discrimination followed them, forcing many other outsiders to make the perilous journey to Miami. This story made is individual, personal and emotional by the focus on the Rosenthal family fleeing Berlin.

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Written in a voice and style reminiscent of memoir, Laurie Stone’s collection of linked short stories My Life as an Animal traces the strengthening and breaking of friendships and family ties in twenty-six stories. The narrator of the stories dances through time—from adolescence to her current life at sixty—and place—New York, Arizona, California, and England. True to life, characters appear and reappear in unexpected ways, affecting others in the past and present.

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Within our world, ripe with the over-thinking of experience, it’s rare to encounter a coming-of-age story quite as visceral or unselfconsciously honest as that found within Jessie van Eerden’s My Radio Radio. Perhaps it’s the subtly surrealist thread that weaves its way through the tale that disarms the reader, setting her up, even readying her, for the unpacking of whatever symbolic gifts of meaning might emerge from the text. Wings. Radio. A baby chick. The click whirr, hiss hmm of a dying man’s machine. Yet, in spite of all that is foreshadowed, in spite of every ounce of allegory, it is within the journey of twelve-year-old Omi Ruth that each of the answers reside, should one choose to listen.

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Melody S. Gee’s new book of poems is a compelling catalog of inheritance and family history—of trying to make a home in a world divided between incarnation and separation, life and death, past and future. The book itself is divided into two sections: “Separate Blood” and “Bone.” So not surprisingly, the poems here deal with bodies and their relation to other bodies, particularly the mother-daughter relationship, but other heritages as well.

 

 

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You and I are filthy but it is / our filth” — “The Flying Phalangers”

Popping with pop culture. Zinging with Net slang. Formless yet formed. Slick and rough. Dating-sites and Netflix and Martha Stewart and Kendrick Lamar and Kim Kardashian and TMZ and ENVY and funerals and coke and religion and love and names become algebra and no one knows where they stand except on the cusp of a new paradigm, a new aesthetic—Take This Stallion is a force of poetic nature.

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Amina Gautier’s third collection of short stories The Loss of All Lost Things is an accomplished reflection of our terrible reality. Abducted children, rent-boys, old maids, drop-outs, mourning parents, aging-regret filled parents, widowers eating uncooked Thanksgiving turkey with canned stuffing, the ugliest faces of divorce riddle each page with regret and melancholia.

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