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Book Review :: Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath

Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The full title of Charan Ranganath’s work, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters, implicitly lays out his goal, as he wants to talk about how and why our brains work, not those times when we believe they don’t. It’s that belief most of us have that Ranganath wants to disprove, as he argues that our brains are designed to forget almost everything we learn or experience; they couldn’t function otherwise.

Instead, he wants readers to see that our brains work quite well when it comes to memory, once we understand why we remember what we do and, thus, how we can retain more of what we want to remember. Part of the problem, he points out, isn’t memory; it’s our lack of attention and intention. We are easily distracted, and we don’t work to remember what we say we want to recall.

He delves into how our feelings do and don’t affect our memories, and he explores how and when our memories change, but also how reliable they often are. Ranganath draws on his experience with teaching to talk about how frequently testing oneself is more beneficial than the studying (i.e., cramming) that most students (and most adults) do.

I found the chapter on openness to novelty and “the strange” to be the most interesting, as we almost always talk about memory’s effects on our past, but, throughout the book, Ranganath also makes the case that our memory shapes who we are today and who we believe we can be tomorrow. His book looks forward as much as it looks back.

Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath. Doubleday, February 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 of James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The first half of the novel James by Percival Everett follows the plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fairly closely, even taking parts of scenes almost word for word. And it seems as if Everett isn’t going to go beyond a few, superficial changes: when Jim is with other enslaved people, for example, they drop their dialect, and Jim can read and write. However, when Jim and Huck encounter the Duke and King, the novel takes a different, much darker and more realistic turn.

Unlike in Twain’s novel, Jim truly suffers, both physically—as several people whip and beat him—and emotionally, such as when he sees people he cares about die. Everett doesn’t only riff on Twain’s novel, though; he also pulls from writers ranging from Ralph Ellison to a variety of slave narratives, and Jim has imaginary conversations with some Enlightenment thinkers, questioning people like John Locke and Voltaire about their hypocrisy concerning slavery.

Writing is at the center of this novel, as Jim (and Everett) is the one telling this story, not a white man through the lens of a white boy from Missouri. Everett uses the change in narration to give Jim a voice, but also a name, as he uses writing to transform himself from a sidekick into a hero, to move from being an enslaved person without agency and choice to become James, a man who makes his own decisions and lives with the consequences. Everett knows this novel is only one more story, but he also knows that the stories we tell matter.

James by Percival Everett. Doubleday, 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 :: Cheap Motels of My Youth by George Bilgere

Cheap Motels of My Youth by George Bilgere book cover image

The poems in George Bilgere’s new chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, are reminiscent of Billy Collins’s writing: imaginative, charming, and wryly humorous. Accessible upon first read, they deepen with subsequent perusal.

Bilgere is a master of shifts in perspective and time. For example, the poem “Nine,” opens in a child’s voice: “I am standing by the pop machine / at the gas station, drinking a root beer… Then, it leaps forward: “How am I supposed to know / that an old, white-haired guy, / a grown-up, is watching me / from his desk in the future, / writing down every move I make.”

The chapbook’s speaker is a son, father, husband, and teacher. He contemplates concerns ranging from grocery shopping and desire to bicycling and mortality. In “Where Will You Go When You Die?” he imagines himself as ashes in a garden watching his children play and his wife grills chicken:

“…not with the same skill, clearly,
as her late husband, although
she does seem to be improving,
as I can see from my vantage point
….next to the hydrangeas,
which I so often failed to fertilize,
or weed, or even water
back when I was alive.
Make yourself useful,
she used to say, and here I am
doing exactly that.”

Cheap Motels of My Youth by George Bilgere. Rattle, 2024.

Reviewer Bio: Mary Beth Hines writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her poetry collection Winter at a Summer House in 2021.

Book Review :: Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne

Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The text of Mister, Mister, Guy Gunaratne’s second novel, is a letter written by the main character, Yahya Bas, to the Mister of the title, a shadowy figure whom the reader never sees or knows, but who seems to work for an intelligence/military arm of the British government. Yahya is writing his account because he has cut his tongue out and, thus, is unable to answer Mister’s questions.

It’s clear Mister believes Yahya is a terrorist, largely based on Yahya’s time spent in Iraq (it’s never clear) several years after the NATO invasion of that country and incendiary poems Yahya published before leaving Britain, writing under the name Al-Bayn, a pun on Albion. Yahya was inspired to write those poems after the pictures from Abu Ghraib became known, but he was already moving in that direction.

Yahya’s father, from all he can tell, left Britain (and Yahya’s mother) to fight in Iraq in the early 1990s, where he also recorded music and poetry, a further inspiration for Yahya’s verses. Yahya’s mother suffers from some sort of depression or anxiety, so she barely speaks, leaving Yahya to be raised by a range of women he calls Mother and his uncle in the house for widows where his mother lives.

Though Yahya’s interrogator is not interested in all of this backstory, Gunaratne is, and the backstory is part of the point. The British intelligence agent only sees Yahya as a terrorist, while he is a son, a nephew, a friend, a lover, a person, in addition to his ethnic heritage and his poems. Gunaratne wants to remind readers of the power of taking back one’s story, even if one has to stop talking to do so.

Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne. Pantheon Books, October 2023.

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 Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff book cover image

The premise of Lauren Groff’s latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, is simple: a girl runs away from a settlement in Colonial America for reasons the reader will discover later in the book. The storyline moves between her attempts to stay alive in an unwelcoming environment and her past life as a servant. Those two situations are not as different from one another as they initially seem.

While Groff tells a believable story about a girl several hundred years ago, she is just as interested in talking about what it means to be a female in the twenty-first century. One of the few times the girl encounters anybody outside the settlement, she sees two Indigenous men. When Groff writes, “And she was chilled to her soul, for it was reflexive, for she feared the fate of women anywhere, women caught alone on a dark street in a city, in a country lane far from human ears, in any place where there were no other people nearby to witness,” she could be describing everyday life for women.

Groff also reminds readers of men’s insatiable need to own and dominate, whether that’s women or land. Near the end of the novel, the narrator reflects, “The men of her own country had always felt this nothing deep within them; . . . it gave them a need to set their boots upon everything they saw.”

Groff is writing about what it means to be a woman in America today, living in fear of what men might do to them while watching what men do to the world around them.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. Riverhead Books, September 2023.

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 English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

While The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt book is a couple of years old now, Ann Patchett recently revived interest in it during one of her weekly videos for Parnassus Books. New Directions publishes these storybooks, as they call them, that look like Little Golden Books from childhood and are short enough for readers to finish them in one sitting. This format reinforces the seemingly simplistic story DeWitt has crafted.

The main character—whom some call Marguerite—has been raised to appreciate luxury and valuable belongings. The title refers to the idea that only certain craftspeople or artisans can use raw materials well to create beautiful clothing and belongings. However, readers find out that Marguerite’s story is more complicated than first appears, and that she’s writing a memoir about that complicated past, one her publisher wants her to write differently.

Marguerite seems to understand little about the broader world, only aware of the sheltered life of luxury her mother exposed her to. There is little more to the plot than that, but there is much more to the book than that. Saying more would spoil the final third of this brief novel, but readers should know by now they can’t judge a book by its cover.

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt. One of the Storybooks 2023 Bundle available from New Directions.

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 :: Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss book cover image

Guest Post by Aiden Hunt

Acclaimed poet Diane Seuss continues her trend of publishing a new collection every three years with her sixth full-length, Modern Poetry. The title comes from the first textbook she encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college. Many of the poem titles are simple, using terminology from that book, like “Ballad,” “Allegory,” “An Aria,” and “Coda.”

As in her collection, frank:sonnets (2021), winner of numerous awards, Seuss plays with form here. A poem called “Villanelle” isn’t one, but begins, “I dreamed I was reading a villanelle / in front of a crowd.” The next poem, however, is titled, “Folk Song,” and it tells a more modern sort of villanelle, or peasant song, “Of selfhood I worked so hard to earn. Of work I worked so hard / to avoid. Of the working class. My class. Its itches and psychological riches.”

Seuss engages the imagination with straight talk about modern life as a working-class woman and relates both her lived experience and her complex relationship with her art in poems like “Ballad That Ends with Bitch,” with her Speaker relating, “At age ten, I turned away from tenderness. / I remember the moment. A flipping of a switch. / My house is a cold mess except for that thing in the corner. / Poetry, that snarling, flaming bitch.”

Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss. Graywolf Press, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a poet, editor, and critic, writing freelance book reviews and critical essays for literary publications. He is the creator and editor of Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online literary journal concerned with poetry chapbooks, their authors, and their publishers.

Book Review :: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martry by Kaveh Akbar book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Martyr!, Akbar’s debut novel tells the story of Cyrus Shams, the only son of his mother Roya—who was killed when the United States shot down an Iranian passagener plane in 1988—and his father Ali, who dies shortly after Cyrus leaves for college, as if he has completed his job of raising his son. Cyrus is an alcoholic and an addict; he’s considering killing himself; but he’s also looking for a sign from God, as he is considering being a martyr, whatever that might mean for somebody who doesn’t have faith in anyone or anything beyond him.

The narrative focuses on Cyrus, but Akbar intersperses shorter chapters that follow Roya and Ali when they are younger, helping the reader understand who they were outside of Cyrus’s limited view. There are even a couple of chapters that focus on Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose role in the Iran-Iraq war was to ride around at night on horseback, wearing a black robe, portraying the angel Gabriel to convince the dying soldiers that their sacrifice was worthwhile.

Cyrus has a few brief conversations with Orkideh, a performance artist in New York City who is dying of breast cancer, as she sits in the museum, talking with anybody who sits down with her. Cyrus has begun writing a collection of poems about martrys in an attempt to understand them and himself, and he believes Orkideh might be one.

While the story itself is compelling, Akbar draws on his skills as a poet to create images and sentences that will resonate long after readers have finished the novel. While watching Cyrus struggle to find who he is is painful, Akbar’s writing makes the journey well worth the effort.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Alfred A. Knopf, January 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 :: Come & Get It by Kiley Reid

Come & Get It by Kiley Reid book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Kiley Reid has said that her second novel, Come & Get It, centers around money; that assertion is undoubtedly true—the novel even ends with a stop at Target. However, like all good novels, this one is about much more than the purported subject.

The reader follows three characters throughout the novel: Agatha, a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas who has also written a book about grief; Kennedy, a transfer student who has come to the university in the hopes of studying with Agatha; and Millie, the Resident Assistant for the dorm where Kennedy is staying.

Every relationship in the novel has the undercurrent of money’s influence, whether that’s Kennedy’s relationship with her suitemates Peyton and Tyler, both of whom believe Kennedy has way too much stuff for a dorm room; or Agatha’s romantic relationship with Robin, a dancer who earns little money; or Agatha’s paying Millie—who hopes to save enough money for a house—to help set up interviews with college students for her research. Class and race also complicate these relationships, not surprisingly when money is involved.

Reid interviewed thirty college students to help create her characters, and her research shows. She’s not condescending toward them, though, no matter how many poor decisions they might make. As in life, the adults are just as likely to make equally bad decisions. Though not a polemic, this novel seems designed to disprove the theory of the rational actor in any situation, economic or otherwise.

Come & Get It by Kiley Reid. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, January 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 :: Absolution by Alice McDermott

Absolution by Alice McDermott book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Absolution, Alice McDermott’s latest novel, is technically an epistolary novel, though it doesn’t read like one. It’s an exchange of only three, long letters between Tricia and Rainey, mainly focusing on Charlene, Rainey’s mother. Tricia and Charlene met in Vietnam as the war was beginning there, both married to men who worked for the American government, but who were not actually part of it or the military. Rainey was a young girl then, but she remembers Tricia and reaches out to her to inform her of the death of a common acquaintance.

Charlene is, as almost everybody describes her, a “dynamo,” always working to try to do good, whether that’s raising money for toys and candy for children in the hospital or visiting a leper colony to provide them with nice clothing. Tricia is much more passive, but Charlene is able to use her shyness as a way to get other women to invest in her ideas, passing them off as Tricia’s.

The novel portrays the women, even Charlene, as hemmed in by their gender, exploring their role in a place where they have no choice but to be, much like the soldiers, but for a very different reason. The main question of the novel, though, is who needs absolution and why: while the obvious answer is the U.S. government and those associated with the horrors of the war, there’s enough unspoken guilt in this world to go around.

Absolution by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2023.

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 :: In a Body by Emily Hockaday

In a Body by Emily Hockaday book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In a Body, Emily Hockaday’s second poetry collection considers a body that “feels / less and less like mine,” and what it might be like to be “outside / of time.” The movement from corporeal to incorporeal suggests trauma and an “interconnected web of pain.” The poems, offered to readers by a mother of a daughter located at the crossroads of a “diagnosis” and “the other side of us,” allude to substance abuse, mental health, chronic pain, breast cancer, and a father’s death.

Given that, it is no wonder that the narrator declares: “I want to be like the Earth, / but I want to be treated better.” Seen via the “micro and macro,” the body of these poems is “compartmentalized” and “becoming”; the body is seen in relation or comparison; the body is seen “after,” “in,” “as,” “at,” “of,” “above,” “before,” “from,” and “through” “momentum” and “metamorphosis.”Poem titles offer the body “Becoming the Owl,” the “Body in the Spring”; “Body Above Water” or “Body as Wood,” etc.

The poet returns to the “Body as Tree” idea several times. When the body is seen as a tree, the mycelia connecting it to other trees is analogous to the “power” that neural pain “wields,” and the network of shared grief over personal and communal loss. Both the narrator’s diagnoses and the death of her father tell us the “body / is ephemeral.”

These poems remind us that we live precariously with “how many batteries / lie below the surface” and our “humanity’s failures.” Survival and recovery depend on “the knowledge that / anything can happen.”

Hockaday’s In a Body “understand[s] what it means / to be” in a “future … never / imagined.”

In a Body by Emily Hockaday. Small Harbor Publishing, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: Layers by Pénélope Bagieu

Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu; translated by Montana Kane book cover image

Pénélope Bagieu’s newest memoir collection of comics, Layers, seems to follow the standard course of symbolism in deconstructing a past through layers of memories, some connected experiences, and some seemingly random recalls. However, by the close of the book, I felt more like I had been layered in warm comforting blankets of someone’s past, perhaps with a few snags and worn patches along the way.

Bagieu’s style is disarming in its simplicity. This black-and-white collection focuses each frame on a particular character or character object with very little if any scenery and minimal props. The focus is on narrative details, some of which follow a particular arc, such as the life of a family cat whose bad behaviors the family puts up with like saints, Bagieu’s recounting her involvement with physical activities that stem from a misunderstanding in her youth, and a lifelong battle with heat – as in the utility.

Bagieu inside page image

Other stories in the collection center on Bagieu’s experiences with sexual harassment, abuse, and just general crappy behavior, whether directed at her or others. The collection was built upon journal pages from Bagieu’s youth, now rendered in hindsight as an adult, but Bagieu retains the sense of being merely an observer and reporter here for the reader to make their own decisions in response to the image sequences.

Adding to the layering effect of the reading is the fact that each segment is followed by a blank page. Somewhat luxurious, but essential to the reading, as with the closing of each piece, that blank page allows the reader to rest a beat and let the story and its meaning settle in before just plowing ahead to the next. This is especially critical to pieces like the harrowing “Florence,” which are so fast-paced, that an extra page of rest is needed for the reader to allow the weight of the narrative to settle.

The closing stories are of strength and gumption, ending the collection with an adult Bagieu wrapping her youthful self in a blanket in one and meeting up with her grandmother in the afterlife in another. These provide closure to the stories collected here, and upend the trope of dismantling the layers of one’s life, as here, the reader feels more layered into the stories and the experiences they provided.

Wrapped in these memories, the reader’s own now entwined with the author’s, Layers feels as comforting as a life well lived.

Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu. First Second :01, October 2023.

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

Book Review :: A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery by Tina Carlson

A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery by Tina Carlson book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The verse and prose poems of Tina Carlson’s third collection, A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, give tender attention to the lives of girls and women in history, our communities, in legend, myth, literature, and the poet’s life. Our narrator is a daughter who reckons with her life as a child caught between an agoraphobic father and an irresponsible mother who requires “mother me.” Around the family table, “she is they,” burdened by “the weight of words caught in her parents’ throats.”

The poems center on trauma related to intergenerational abuse along matrilineal lines and what follows “after generations of war” along patrilineal lines, but everyone within these poems has their personal, societal, and existential “battles.” Throughout this collection, the poet endeavors to give voice to the oppressed and that which is “made of scars,” to figure out “what to give up and what to throw away,” and how to “untether the tongue.”

Though tongue tie surgery is performed to improve breastfeeding, it has lasting implications for the children and adults who undergo the quick, effective surgery. Results such as these poems, speaking from their wish “to be unarmored.”

In these poems, there is an alternative to sorrow; there is perseverance.

A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery by Tina Carlson. University of New Mexico Press, August 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: Life Cycle of the Mayfly by Maya Clubine

Life Cycle of the Mayfly by Maya Clubine book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Steeped in the tannins of Heraclitus’s philosophy and the ecology of the Credit River in Ontario, Canada, Maya Clubine offers readers her chapbook Life Cycle of the Mayfly, a series of poems memorializing her relationship with her grandfather and father through the sport of fly fishing.

The “river bugs” in Clubine’s poems are the mayfly, the poet, and the men in her family from whom she learned how to tie flies and inherited flyfishing accouterments such as the waders both her grandfather and father wore. Via declarative and descriptive sentences, the movement of the poems is “catch” and “release”; their form is a memoir-epistolary hybrid.

As the poet writes her letter to her dying father, “mayflies lead the way like lanterns rising / into the air.” The precarious lifecycles of the people and insects point to Heraclitus’s philosophical declaration that there is nothing permanent except change.

Life Cycle of the Mayfly offers readers a family story; the poet’s and the mayfly’s families are “interwoven webs /.. rivers make.” The movement of the river’s waters, of the people fishing those waters, and of “mayfly wings” are the “fragile movements” of Clubine’s poems, movements that will “leave” their “traces” on your earthly heart, dear reader.

Life Cycle of the Mayfly by Maya Clubine. Vallum Chapbook Series, No. 36, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: The Last Day Before Exile by Selin Bucak

The Last Day Before Exile by Selin Bucak book cover image

Guest Post by Eleanor J. Bader

By mid-2023, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 110 million people worldwide had been displaced by political turmoil, war, economic instability, or ethnic or gender-based discrimination. But the numbers tell just part of this harrowing story.

Journalist Selin Bucak’s first book, The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement and Finding Home, zeroes in on the social trauma that typically ensues for asylum-seekers and refugees and makes clear that it is not only adults who suffer. As the World Health Organization confirms, migrant children often experience poverty, disturbed schooling, and racism in their new homelands, experiences that can lead to lifelong emotional difficulties.

“There are a lot of statistics about asylum seekers and refugees and it is depressingly easy to ignore the individuals behind the numbers,” Bucak writes. By introducing eight people who fled Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, she hopes to change that.

While their stories are not representative–all of her interviewees were granted asylum–they nonetheless provide a nuanced introduction to the dangers facing political activists, LGBTQIA+ people, feminists, and select ethnic groups by anti-democratic governments. Lastly, although the book sidesteps the issues facing migrants at the US-Mexico border, perhaps this will be fodder for a future volume.

The book is now available in the United States with free shipping through April 12 of this year.

The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement and Finding Home by Selin Bucak. 404 Ink, November 2023.

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 :: We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light by Sarah Rosenthal

We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light by Sarah Rosenthal book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Sarah Rosenthal’s chapbook, We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light, the reader is offered the opportunity to view the manual labor behind making cut-up and collaged poems from a dream journal. Black text on a white background affixed to a gray page creates little rectangular light boxes, illuminating the poet’s tactile and associative compositional process.

The composition itself is lyric and elegiac. At its center is a “self / positioning,” figuring out “how to / squeeze into language.” This “implies trauma.” The reader is addressed directly by “Estelle meaning star,” though others or other aspects of Estelle— “I” and “she”— contribute to the conversation from “broken down / years.”

Foremost here seems to be a “child… / en route to woman,” experiencing “a pain that stretches the length of a body” or “one hundred fifty / … years.” The spare, pressured composition matches well with concerns about female identity and pain.

The composition emits a quality of the embodied and disembodied; though words have been affixed to pages and fixed in space, meaning and definitions are in transit. For Estelle, “who dots the sky,” we are her observers. We witness how “night’s / middle daughter / disperses” and is given “a new name.”

To read Rosenthal’s chapbook-length poem is to remind us that “the / dreams we have / [are] divining rods.”

We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light by Sarah Rosenthal. Drop Leaf Press, 2022.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: A House for Alice by Diana Evans

A House for Alice by Diana Evans book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The title of Evans’ most recent novel seemingly relates to the house that Alice—the mother to the three daughters whose lives make up most of the novel—wants to build in Benin so she can live out her remaining days in her home country. Then there’s the pun on house, as in the word for a family line. Given the focus on Alice’s daughters, especially Carol and Melissa, that title would also make sense.

However, Evans wants readers to think of house even more broadly, as most of the characters are searching for a home of some sort, whether that’s in their marriage or within themselves or in their country, especially given the UK’s colonial past. That past comes to the forefront early in the novel, as Alice’s estranged husband Cornelius dies in a fire at his house on the same day of the Grenfell Tower fire.

The Pitt family’s mourning of their father and husband is complicated by the abusive relationship he had with all of them—emotional, physical, or sexual, depending on the wife or daughter. Similarly, the Grenfell Tower reveals how the UK has treated those who seek a better life there, whether the working class, the poor, or immigrants, serving as a metaphor for a country who says they care for such people, but then abuse and exploit them.

As with those who suffered from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the members of the Pitt family have only each other to rely on to create a home.

A House for Alice by Diana Evans. Pantheon Books, September 2023.

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 :: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

June and Athena both attended Yale and majored in writing; they even both began publishing short stories, then a novel for each of them. At that point, though, their careers took decidedly different paths. June’s novel ended up with a small press that folded, while Athena’s novel was the first step in a literary career that led to a deal with Netflix. Unfortunately, on the night when she and June are celebrating that deal, Athena dies.

The bulk of Yellowface proceeds from that point, as June steals a typed manuscript Athena has written and passes it off as her own, even going by her full first and middle name—Juniper Song—to make it less clear that she has no Asian heritage. Kuang’s novel raises questions about cancel culture, social media, the publishing world, and who gets to tell which stories (who controls narratives, in general).

While June is not a likable narrator, Kuang works hard not to stereotype her, especially when talking about June’s experiences in the publishing industry. June is not treated all that well when she’s a no-name novelist, and Kuang doesn’t hold back from criticizing the insularity of the industry.

However, what drives the novel is the sharp-edged satire of June’s belief that she’s entitled to publish this novel and deserves all the celebration that comes with it. Readers should see June’s obliviousness to her privilege; what matters, though, is if they can see their own in her.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. William Morrow, May 2023.

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 Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In this second novel by Mathis, the three main characters — Dutchess, Ava, and Toussaint — are each unsettled in some significant way. Dutchess spends her nights wandering through the woods of Bonaparte, Alabama, a fictional town created by African Americans after the end of slavery, where she often encounters the ghosts of those who have come before, another group of unsettled people.

Ava left that town and hasn’t returned, moving around the country before settling into an unhappy marriage in New Jersey that she leaves at the beginning of the novel, ending up in Philadelphia. She begins by having to move into a homeless shelter, then into 248 Ephraim Avenue, a house for the Ark, a place reminiscent of the homes the Black Panthers created in the 1960s. (One should also note that 248 is twice 124, the house in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Mathis explores trauma in her own way.) Ava’s son Toussaint has had to follow her, but, once they land in the shelter, he begins skipping school and roaming around Philadelphia.

While the bulk of the plot focuses on Ava and Toussaint’s attempts to find some sort of stability and meaning, with forays into Dutchess’s attempts to keep the town of Bonaparte from completely disappearing, what undergirds the novel are the systems that have oppressed and continue to oppress African Americans, especially relating to land and property. In the same way that the characters struggle to find a place that is truly their own, Mathis shows how systemic racism and white supremacy have denied African Americans a home in this country.

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023.

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 :: Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas

Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, Dimitris Xygalatas brings a wealth of research about rituals, both from the laboratory and the field, but also a depth of passion and interest in a subject that doesn’t get as much study as it does reflection. He is honestly looking for an answer to the question his subtitle implies, as he understands that rituals don’t provide any practical meaning to our lives, but we seem unable to live without them.

Xygalatas delves into how rituals provide order to people’s lives and how they help people bond. He explores how non-religious rituals help people connect with something beyond themselves and why people are willing to sacrifice their time, their money, and even their bodies for such acts. He illustrates how rituals help one’s mental and physical well-being, even when there’s intense suffering involved.

Near the end of the book, which he wrote during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he shows how even minor rituals are important enough for people to try to recreate, such as drive-by birthday parties and graduations, and how rituals must be flexible to continue providing meaning as our world changes. He differentiates between ritual and habit, revealing how we all need a source of purpose in our lives, whether religious or secular, and how rituals that don’t make much sense to those outside of a tradition help us find that purpose that encourages us to keep living and growing.

Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas
Little, Brown Spark, September 2022.

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 :: All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Sunday Forrester, the narrator of Lloyd-Barlow’s Booker-longlisted novel All the Little Bird-Hearts, is different than her family and friends. She prefers to eat white food only; she isn’t concerned about how she dresses; and her internal monologue makes it clear that she struggles in social situations. Though she never explicitly says she’s autistic, Lloyd-Barlow’s biography explains that she has “extensive personal, professional, and academic experience relating to autism,” and the publisher’s page pronounces the book to be “a remarkable debut by an author who is herself autistic.”

Despite her struggles, though, Sunday is quite happy with her life, both with her work at her ex-husband’s family’s greenhouse and her life with her daughter from that marriage, Dolly. Her life, in fact, seems to get better when Vita and Rollo move into the house beside hers, renting it for at least the summer, perhaps longer. Vita, especially, brings excitement and color to Sunday’s life, as Vita seems the opposite of Sunday in every aspect, yet she seems enamored by her new neighbor.

Vita and Rollo begin taking Sunday, then Dolly, into their life on a more regular basis. However, Vita and Rollo bring a wider world into Dolly’s small-town life, often taking her to London and showing her what a life away from her mother could look like. They use Sunday’s differences to create conflict, heightened by the difference in wealth and class, leading to a difficult ending for all involved.

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow. Algonquin Books, December 2023.

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 Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky

The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky book cover image

Guest Post by Nick Agelis

David Lipsky’s 2023 summer release, The Parrot and the Igloo, is a non-fiction work that focuses on climate change, but even more provocatively, the growing denial of its existence and the mammoth topic of potential human extinction.

Lipsky explains why climate change is so contentious using trendy narrative non-fiction techniques (think Capote or Mailer) to give insight into not only Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla’s scientific minds, but their personal idiosyncrasies as well. These insights allow casual readers to digest a convoluted and complicated topic: climate change and the subsequent denial of it.

Lipsky’s portrayal of a doom and gloom scenario reads like a comic entertainment of a who’s who in the field of science. Rife with current pop culture references from Disney’s Frozen to equating the severity of an ozone hole to a Christopher Nolan special effect, Lipsky makes reading about a potentially pending apocalypse fun. Wait… Is that possible? Unequivocally, yes.

Lipsky garnered much of his fame writing about the much more famous David Foster Wallace in his quasi memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. But with the emergence of this Pynchonesque tragicomedy of world population proportions, Lipsky firmly stands on his own.

The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky. W.W. Norton & Co., July 2023.

Reviewer Bio: Nicholas Agelis is an unpublished high school English teacher and basketball coach in North Jersey, and is currently an MFA student at William Paterson University.

Book Review :: How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu

How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu book cover image

Guest Post by Debbie Pierre

Winner of the 2023 The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Fiona Lu’s debut chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, is a layered introspection on survival and mourning.Lu offers a glimpse into the irreplaceable and delicate nature of life on a personal level, as discussed in “Elegy” and “Misstep.” On the other hand, she plays devil’s advocate by painting the insignificance of one’s life in the grander schemes of the world in poems such as “Loneliness” and “Poem Made Entirely of Gardens.”

In addition, Lu’s poetry collection displays a great deal of hand imagery to convey the God-like power and control that lie in one’s hands, “he / stuck his hand into a fishtank and squeezed,” as well as the kindness and humanity capable from the same hands, “the way he always claps his hands in apology / before he feasts,” as demonstrated in “Hunting.”

Lu’s quiet resilience commands each page or world of hers, unafraid of experimenting with different forms and rhythms. Evidently, she has given much thought to the artistic composition of her pieces, since many are worthy of the cork/bulletin board treatment.

Overall, How to Become the God of Small Things delivers startling reality checks on mortality, leaving readers to ponder its visceral imagery in moments of stillness.

How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu. October 2023

Reviewer Bio: Debbie Pierre is working towards an MFA in Creative & Professional Writing from William Paterson University. She is the recipient of Bloomfield College’s Joyce Carol Oates Award in Creative Writing in 2022. As an up-and-coming poet, her poems have appeared in BC Underground. She loves the macabre, the arts, and cheesy jokes.

Book Review :: Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

On one level, the title of Lahiri’s story collection, Roman Stories, is an obvious description of the work, given that all of the stories take place in Rome. However, in many of the stories, the characters are not actually Roman, or at least not by birth and, sometimes, citizenship.

Instead, they have often come to Rome later in life, and, thus, the retain that outsider status, even if they end up staying in Rome for the remainder of their days. By taking such an approach, Lahiri gives voice to a wide variety of characters, pointing out the multitude of stories found in a city like Rome.

The best example of this approach is the longest story in the collection, and the only one in Part II: “Steps.” The story shifts through six different sections, each focused on a different person/group of people: The Mother, The Widow, The Expat Wife, The Girl, Two Brothers, The Screenwriter. Each character or group has a connection to the same set of steps, a connection that reveals something important about each character or group. Though they come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, this place in Rome binds them all together, at least on some level.

That serves as a metaphor for the collection itself, as the characters are diverse, but their connection to Rome binds them all together, whether they want to be or not.

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Alfred A. Knopf, October 2023.

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 :: How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo’s collection of essays comes from the lineage of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, a work Castillo references several times. She wants to show readers the assumed whiteness of their reading and writing, the assumed whiteness of their world, essentially.

Castillo analyzes a wide range of writing (and texts in a wider sense), from the controversial Nobel-prize-winning Peter Handke to Jane Austen to the Cinderella story to Homer’s Odyssey, with many stops in between.

Like Morrison, Castillo points out numerous places where writers assume characters are white without any description of their being so and the effects that has on readers and how they see the world. She reminds readers to look for the gaps in texts, the places where authors are silent about the reality of the world in which they write, such as Austen’s father’s involvement in the buying and selling of those who were enslaved.

Her main point, which underlies all others, is that white writers/readers get the benefit of seeing their work as universal, while writers of color are educational material, something one reads to learn about a particular culture, not work that conveys any ideas about simply being human. After reading Castillo’s collection, a reader can’t help but look at the world and their reading differently, high praise for any book.

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo. Viking, July 2022.

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 :: Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke book cover image

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke is the fantastical adventure of young mop-headed Milo who is sent looking for his baby sister’s missing sock in the basement of their new home. Not just any sock, this “special sock” was made by her Tia Maria “with her special yarn.” The pressure is on as Milo reluctantly heads into the strange, gloomy basement to check the laundry.

What ensues is a series of Milo stumbling into and across one breadcrumb to the next, each taking him deeper and deeper into a secret world under his house. For kids who are terrified of basements, so is Milo! He is resistant time and again to continue his pursuit of the missing sock, but as he meets various underground dwellers and becomes entangled in their plight to survive, his inner hero eventually shines through.

Hatke’s use of frameless borders and often organically shaped panels lends to the eerie feeling of the story along with a rich palette of shades to reflect the gloomy atmosphere. Brighter colors emerge as the action ramps up with some pages seeming to burst with energy and excitement. Dialogue is minimal throughout, with some characters communicating in easily interpreted symbols.

Milo’s lack of confidence throughout the story is frustrating at times, but this also makes him a wonderful role model for kids who may fear basements as well as for kids who are fascinated by them. In the end, Milo’s victory saves his newly forged underground friendships and allows him to conquer his own internal struggle, making him the ultimate hero.

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke. First Second :01, August 2023.

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

Book Review :: Transitions: A Mother’s Journey by Élodie Durand

Transitions: A Mother's Journey by Élodie Durand book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Transitions: A Mother’s Journey, Élodie Durand’s graphic nonfiction work, takes a nontraditional approach to narrative, visuals, and the idea of transitioning. First, this work isn’t a memoir, as Durand doesn’t tell her story; instead, she tells the story of Anne and Alex Marbot, fictional names for the mother and child whose lives she shares with the reader. Durand also moves back and forth in time, telling the Marbots’ story chronologically, at times, but then breaking up that story with inserts from Anne’s journal, which includes various inserts about gender identity.

Visually, the work moves between more realistic comic panels that tell most of the story and impressionistic sketches that reveal how characters (usually Anne) are feeling. The real difference, though, comes in the idea of transitioning. Rather than telling Alex’s story of their transition from female to male, this work focuses on Anne’s transition as she learns to accept her son for who he is.

Alex knows who he is throughout the work, as the reader only sees him after he comes to his mother to tell her of his decision. Anne, however, takes a couple of years to accept Alex, a journey that sees her move from questioning Alex’s decision in the fairly typical ways (believing they’re too young to make a decision or that their therapist put such an idea in their head) to becoming not just an accepting parent, but a staunch ally in the fight for trans rights and acceptance.

In this story, Anne is the one who must transition into becoming who she needs to be by the end of the work.

Transitions: A Mother’s Journey by Élodie Durand; translated by Evan McGorray. Top Shelf Productions, September 2023.

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 :: Telling the Truth as It Comes Up by Alice Notley

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up by Alice Notley

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 by Alice Notley is a collection of prose writing that gives opinions and anecdotes of strong interest to reviewers and scholars of contemporary poets and poetics. It is also a great companion to Notley’s poetry, especially her book, At Night the States.

Notley digs deep into dream territory in the first essay, “What Can Be Learned From Dreams?” and says, “This work is also very disobedient” when describing her new work. Because she uses terms and language that are accessible, what is sometimes difficult and complex about poetry becomes transparent and real.

“The Mohave desert is vast with space and one fills it with thoughts and dreams—or I did. I acquired certain habits of thought from growing up in this landscape,” Notley writes in “Dreams, Again.”

I was so happy to find “Where’d You Get It?” her essay on Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger (2018) tucked in between “Musical Influences” and writing about Philip Whalen’s collected poems, “To do exactly that, right now” (2007).

Notley shows and tells what is apparent and transfers her whole self into whatever she discusses. In this collection, she is also a historian of American Poetry, especially the particular dreamscapes that modern technology brought/brings to influence dreams and dreaming.

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 by Alice Notley. The Song Cave, November 2024.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker-prize-winning novel, Prophet Song, is timely and bleak. In a modern-day Ireland, the new government has passed laws that give them the power to clamp down on dissent, imprisoning and disappearing anyone who disagrees with them. That includes Larry, a leader of the teachers’ union, and, more importantly, Eilish’s husband.

Lynch follows Eilish and her four children as they try to hold their life together after Larry is arrested and the country slowly devolves into martial law, leading to a violent rebellion. Lynch mirrors this closing in by writing the novel without paragraph breaks, hemming the reader in, much as the Dubliners he writes about become increasingly trapped.

For much of the novel, Eilish tries to hold her family together by pretending their life is normal: she continues to take baby Ben to daycare, get the older kids to school, care for her father who is suffering from dementia. Even as some people leave the country, something Eilish’s sister who lives in Canada is willing to help Eilish and the family do, Eilish continues working to keep up a normal life. Ultimately, though, the conflict takes its toll on the family, which begins to fracture.

There’s no way to read this novel without thinking of the current rise of fascist or fascist-like leaders, despite the reader only seeing the result of decisions, not the politicians in charge. Sinclair Lewis titled a novel It Can’t Happen Here, which is how Eilish feels, but Lynch makes it abundantly clear what happens when people think that way.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Oneworld, 2023.

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 :: A Shining by Jon Fosse

A Shining by Jon Fosse book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Compared to Septology, the doorstop that is John Fosse’s multi-volume, A Shining is a relative pamphlet. At 75 pages, the story can be summarized as follows: in the midst of a dérive, a man drives aimlessly (much like Fosse himself did while calming his nerves before the announcement of his being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature), turning left and right without a thought, before he finds himself deep in the forest, his car stuck in the mud. He gets out to look for help, but all he finds is a shining, otherworldly presence. As the strangeness ramps up, he gets distracted from thoughts about his car.

There is some dialogue, though more often than not the slim cast of characters are unheard or ignored. The man’s words usually form a monologue, tracking his attempts to posit onto the world of A Shining a logic that is perpetually evading him. A dreamlike quality persists throughout; despite all the questioning, attempts to unwind the supernatural events are lackadaisical, and the phantasmal world is accepted without much fightback. At times, the glacial pacing of Fosse’s novella feels like an episode of sleep paralysis.

Comparisons to Beckett are hardly original, though A Shining does illuminate them. Here, as in Beckett’s famous trilogy, the world is shrunk down to the parameters of the story, characters are often nameless, seemingly insignificant objects become totems, and besides events that make up the blurb, nothing really happens.

A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls. Transit Books, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Berlin. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.

Book Review :: This Other Eden by Paul Harding

This Other Eden by Paul Harding book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Paul Harding bases his new novel, This Other Eden, on a historical settlement of mixed-race people on an island off the coast of Maine. He uses that history as a springboard to create deep and rich characters who live there, ranging from Ethan Honey, a boy who can pass for white and has artistic talent that provides him with an opportunity others from the island never receive, to his grandmother Esther, a woman who sees the reality of what will come to their island, but who provides medicinal help to the residents in the meantime.

There are other finely-drawn characters, as well, such as Zachary Hand to God, who lives mostly in a tree while carving scenes from the Bible, and the Larks, who are almost translucent due to the amount of intermarriage in their family.

Harding pulls from historical accounts of what the government ultimately did to the residents of the island, relocating them to the mainland, putting them in institutions, even possibly sterilizing them to keep them from reproducing. Harding’s narrative voice, though, presents some contemporary views of Ethan’s artwork and the government’s actions, showing that those who lived on the island, while different than the mainlanders, had a thriving community with a culture of its own.

Harding reminds readers that what we do to others today will appear quite different a hundred years from now, which should give us pause before we alienate those who don’t match our definitions of normalcy.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding. W.W. Norton, 2023.

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 :: This Country by Navied Mahdavian

This Country by Navied Mahdavian book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America, Navied Mahdavian’s graphic memoir, is, on the surface, the story of his and his wife’s attempt to literally make a home in rural Idaho. They have Amish builders construct and transport a tiny house to their land, and they begin learning how to survive in harsh conditions.

During their first winter, they’re unable to start their cars and, thus, get anywhere to buy food. Their attempts to raise enough food to live on doesn’t go well for their first year or two. They struggle to stay warm during the long, Idaho winters. However, their neighbors (loosely defined in such a rural setting, as they’re often more than a mile away) help them out, tell them stories about the area, and give them tips to help them survive. However, those same neighbors tell Mahdavian, whose parents are Iranian, that ISIS is in Idaho, they ask him if he’s Muslim, and they use racial and ethnic slurs to describe others when talking to him.

Navied and Emilie move to Idaho just before the 2016 election, which highlights such comments even more, making the book ultimately about Navied and Emilie’s attempt to find a country, to truly make a home, in a place that doesn’t welcome them. They ultimately have to face the choice of living the rural life they want or going elsewhere to try to create the life they want for themselves and their daughter.

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian. Princeton Architectural Press, September 2023.

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 Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s latest novel, set primarily in rural Ireland, follows a family of four that is clearly having a difficult time. Dickie, the father, is in the process of running the family car dealership into the ground, while Imelda, his wife, is trying to understand who she is when she can’t define herself by spending money. Cass, their daughter, begins making some poor decisions around school, due largely to the family’s disintegration. PJ, their son, is experiencing the normal struggles of early adolescence and in desperate need of a friend.

Those problems sound like the setup for a typical domestic novel, but this book isn’t typical, as the bee sting of the title echoes back to Dickie and Imelda’s wedding and marriage, which is much more complicated and fraught than first seems. In fact, all of the characters have secrets that Murray slips out through a variety of flashbacks, as he allows each of the four main characters their own sections, so the reader can see them as they truly are, not as others see them.

That theme of appearance versus reality runs throughout the entire novel, and Murray is not about to let the reader off easy with a tied-up ending that will make it clear how this family fairs. Like all of us, they will continue to struggle, one way or another.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 2023.

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 :: Plucked by Miracle Thorton

Plucked by Miracle Thorton book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

These poems are about what is left after cruelties. Thornton’s voice is at a whisper. She shows us what it is like to be young and vulnerable, and we can barely grasp the magnitude of events that happen because her telling is elusive, it is non-confrontational. Many poems deal with hair and looks and how the world and the self react to what others expect, as in these lines from the amazing prose poem “Quick”:

[…] these twins with hair like disturbed water lead the show, they take
gymnastics. you learned how to do a cartwheel off the tv. you join them
because the teachers are suspicious. they never leave you alone.

And this excerpt from “Jackdaw”:

embarrassed by his unfiltered blackness,
how it rings in his laugh like a broken key,

Thorton’s poems build and become fiercer and then settle down at the end to beauty found in nature instead of what might preoccupy humans. From “Equinox”:

[…] leaves, us calling, him calling, silky
traces of inch worms, cottontails

What it tells about is something we cannot exactly find yet get hints from through the actions of others. What we want changes into something we don’t want and are stuck with until it also disappears.

Plucked by Miracle Thorton. Rattle, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright

Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The super real, feminist, and sharp-edged poems of Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors are at turns an “embodied presence / in virtual environments,” a “fever / dream of escape,” a “walk through the cemetery,” and “a scathing assessment” of our time. To tell us like it is, our self-deprecating narrator, a fierce new mother, “got” her wings “removed,” owns her “inner bitch,” and admits she “know[s] … little about how to live / a good life or about who [she] want[s] to be.”

A line item in her assessment: The angelic/“rowdy” paradigm for women within her family and the impact a woman’s choices have on “job, … marriage, / a life organized // around wealth.”

Another item: Relationship difficulties. We are reminded “don’t kid // yourself, love has always been / transactional.” Our “demons / look like our mothers… exes / … bosses and professors” who “condescend / and lecture and harangue, activating / shames from childhood.”

These poems implicate “parental models,” gatekeepers, “scammers,” “tourists,” the “betrayer and betrayed,” and the “visionaries and oracles,” and they make us face the “old sputtering hurts” we cause ourselves, one another, and our world. This is the world our narrator has brought her child into, admitting we “can’t fix” or “staunch” its bleeding fast enough. It may not be fair, but some of us “get to stay here longer than the white rhinos, / the bees.” Informed by environmental ethicist Michael Vincent McGinnis’s term “species loneliness,” Catriona Wright’s poems “flicker” and “mourn,” and are “as likely as anything / to banish loneliness from the world.”

Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: Slows: Twice by T. Liem

Slows: Twice by T. Liem book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The poems, “filled with ellipses and reversals,” of T. Liem’s Slows: Twice are offered by a “speaker” who doesn’t “always feel / like” they are who they “say” they are, from a “threshold / between [self] and potential in any direction.” That is, the poems explore and explicate a betweenness: “on either side / of leaving… on either side / of the kind of words that look / right at you and leave you / in the middle of nowhere.” Even “nowhere” is “somewhere.”

This “threshold” is a way to “conceive of what a border could consist of.” A “border” is a place where “two things can be true at once”; both a place where “every fact has an afterlife” and a place “to link arms with some future.” At a border, time folds in on itself. The present reflects “what looks back at you”; the future “what can unfold from hurt.”

Liem’s poems swing on the hinges of “asking and repeating” the question: “[W]hat will carry you through what hurt you?” The poet uses mirror imaging and strikethroughs of poem text to suggest this phenomenon of “renewal or expiry.” The poet also uses their poems to argue with “time… spent // in omission” because, they assert, “there is no place and time / without names.” Our “bodies become an etymology”; “language is change.”

Dear Reader, whether you would choose to “slow time, / speed it up,” “[w]ouldn’t you like to be transported?” To read T. Liem’s Slows: Twice is to encounter “what other kind of living”—and writing—”is possible.”

Slows: Twice by T. Liem. Coach House Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Western Lane, Chetna Maroo’s debut, Booker-Prize-shortlisted novel, follows Gopi, a British Indian teenager after the death of her mother. Before her mother’s death, her father had been taking her and her two sisters to Western Lane to play squash, but the game was nothing more than a hobby.

After the funeral, their father takes it much more seriously, mainly due to their Aunt Ranjan’s complaint that the girls are wild and need discipline. While her two sisters lose interest in the game, Gopi becomes obsessed with it, mainly as a way to build a connection with her father, but she also becomes quite good at it.

She is too good to play with her sisters, so she begins playing with Ged, a non-Indian boy whose mother works at Western Lane, a relationship that threatens to develop into something more. While her father grieves the death of her mother, Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan offer to take in one of the girls to help him, which complicates Gopi’s burgeoning squash playing, as Aunt Ranjan thinks it’s unacceptable for a girl to participate in such a sport.

The novel is quiet and concise, as the characters and the narrator often leave what is most important unsaid, but readers can see the relationships fray and deepen as Gopi grows into a formidable player and teenage girl.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2023.

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.

Book Review :: Scorch by Natalie Rice

Scorch by Natalie Rice book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Scorch, Natalie Rice writes “under the gravity / of immovable objects.” Our narrator asks, “How far can one carry such // emptiness?” Someone in these lyric, meditative poems wants “to be lonely,” despite the “ache in my chest completely / out of control”; yearns to feel “the freight / of my own becoming,” “to know the narrative // of my life.” In this way, Rice’s poems form a seeker’s pilgrimage and a mountain retreat “to lean / into what cannot be explained.”

There’s a sense that the poems are “tethered” to an aftermath of “collapse,” and that though there may be “nothing / left here to burn,” there is reparation and rejuvenation taking place: “a newness /… pushing / through soot,” marking how easily the natural world holds “contradictions.”

Situated in and “shaped by the living world of the Okanagan valley,” the poems “ blaze” with “iridescent bodies”: “the lady slipper / [that] blooms before the tiger lily,” “wild clematis,” “balsamroot flower,” “the last goldenrod /… plucked for the table,” and “[g]rass [that] is a fire // before it knows it is fire.” Is this “what emptiness sounds like” from “a body designed for grief”? “What if the answer // is that there is no answer?” Then, could it be enough to recognize the “unsayable // hung like a red berry in the back / of [the] throat”? Might the act of describing cast one of the “spells / to ward off longing,” “a common grief… / dissolving without telling // us why”?

Dear Reader, with a fine “ear / tethered to the ground” and “one line of a poem…tethered to two hundred / million small, beating bodies,” Natalie Rice heightens our awareness “into something so precious.”

Scorch by Natalie Rice. Gaspereau Press, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: The Telling, The Listening by Catharine Clark-Sayles

The Telling, The Listening by Catharine Clark-Sayles book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

With a beautiful cover of a painting by Octavio Quintanilla (cats sleeping on the rooftops) of what could be a view from outside a hospital, these poems are reports to professionals, from professionals, and to oneself. Where does a voice, a person exist? Clark-Sayles answers, from “Falling”: little difference between flying and falling [. . . ] wheeze of air trembling just out of reach, slow reach and wiggle to find what moves and what won’t.

In “Night Call” Clark-Sayles tells the inside story of what it’s like to be a doctor: “I will love this midnight world,” and throughout The Telling, The Listening, she puts readers directly in this world of decisions and consequences. What becomes apparent is that a lot that happens is sheer luck, and we see that many times health professionals mainly practice being witnesses to life, with much sacrifice. From “Why I Seldom Sing”: “I’ve broken through walls to gain my calling and the breaking took my voice.”

Clark-Sayles gives us poems that sing out to the world to recover what was taken and broken. Poems that are the perfect embodiment of narrative medicine: a rigorous mixture of despair, celebration, and wonderment.

The Telling, The Listening by Catharine Clark-Sayles. St. Julian Press, October 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: a dangerous vacation by Dale Houstman

a dangerous vacation by Dale Houstman book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Dale Houstman is one of the avant-garde poets often published in Caliban in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and in the 2000s as Caliban’s later incarnation, Caliban Online, edited and published by Lawrence R. Smith. On Facebook, recently, Houstman inventories his personal library under “My Unsightly Library.” It is great to see his writing; it is like Caliban has come back to life. Much like the Dada expressionists after the First World War, Houstman is as much an artist as he is a poet and writer/reader, and we get to see his surreal view at work.

Caliban Online features Houstman’s work in book form, along with half a dozen other Caliban contributors on a page called “Caliban’s Bookshelf.” These can be downloaded free of charge. Houstman’s poetry book (his sole publication), a dangerous vacation, is beautiful with its red titles and tiny dots which frame black letters on white paper, and the poems are arranged mainly in couplets and tercet stanzas; very musical looking and vibrant.

“They are ‘like Rorschach ink blots,’” Houstman says. Take a peek and be prepared to be fascinated by his pyrotechnics, by his electric mind.

a dangerous vacation by Dale Houstman. Caliban Online, 2017.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith

To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In To Free the Captives, poet Tracy K. Smith brings her lyrical writing style to the essay form, as she explores what it means to be Black in America today. Rather than straightforward essays laying out an argument, though, Smith uses parts of her life—her marriage and motherhood, for example—as entry points into meditations on the world as she experiences it.

She ruminates on the difference between being Free (white) and Freed (Black) throughout the collection, as she reminds readers that the past is as present as ever, for good and ill. She draws on the lineage she knows and delves into her family history, but she also looks to the broader Black culture for ancestors who can support her and the other Freed, as they continue to shape lives of meaning and beauty.

This approach isn’t metaphorical for Smith, as she feels those who have come before her speaking to her and guiding her in who she should be and who she could yet become. Her subtitle of “A Plea for the American Soul” reminds readers that both the Free and Freed must live in and through this past, as we all seek to create a present and future together; ignoring the past will only deepen the divide that has always existed in the American soul.

To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

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.

Book Review :: The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future by Naomi Alderman book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The Future, Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, is set in a near-future America that’s dominated by three tech companies: Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar. Those companies are a clear combination of social media sites (ranging from Facebook to TikTok), Apple, and Amazon, and their three leaders echo attributes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.

I would like to say that the fictional companies are doing far more damage to Alderman’s world than their real-life inspiration, but I could only say that for certain because Alderman lets readers know what her CEOs are actually up to. They’re preparing for the end of the world, as was Martha Einkorn — who was raised in a cult that focused on preparing for the end of the world, but who has become the assistant for the CEO of Fantail — and Lai Zhen, a survivalist who’s become famous thanks to her online presence.

They meet and begin a relationship that is complicated by the billionaires’ seeming desire to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Alderman’s satire of our technology-obsessed world and the egos that run it is spot on, but she also creates characters worth caring about.

Readers won’t just want the world to continue because they want to see the tech leaders lose, but because they want Martha and Lai Zhen to live on.

The Future by Naomi Alderman. Simon and Schuster, November 2023.

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.

Book Review :: Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse

Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Imagine zoning out during a campfire talk at a National Park, wondering what the ranger’s life is really like during their off-hours. . . This book of essays satisfies some of that curiosity as Jeff Darren Muse takes readers through his life’s journey. Muse offers the ins and outs of his profession through carefully constructed prose and is very entertaining in his telling. In his chapter “SAR Talk,” Muse describes being behind the counter while his co-rangers pack up gear: “The counter is important, I tell myself. The lead ranger put me here because I’m good with people. […] I’ve got a shiny badge that looks like a toy. I’ve got a buzz cut, a thinning hairline. I’m in my own damn storm. On a ledge. Stuck.” Here, Muse is talking about his own anger that has put him “on a ledge.” This writing explores how Muse rescues himself by acknowledging what is around him and what and who has traveled before him. Gary Snyder is one of his role models, and Muse shares private thoughts and experiences walking in Snyder’s footsteps, traveling further and further into ranger adventures.

Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse. Wayfarer Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey

Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

In response to Karen Massey’s Songs From The Dementia Suitcase, I wonder who would want these songs, let alone be handed this suitcase, when the whole world is at odds with memory (past wrongs/wars/devastation)? Well, what I found inside this excellent work was a surprise in the form of a short poem of found material called “Two Blue Songs,” which Massey notes uses Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” as a source text. “Two Blue Songs” is folded into narrative poems having to do with family and caregiving. Not that the work is bereft of these; what surprises me is the wonderful short parts to it, divided “1.” and “2.” which look a little old-fashioned, yet so familiar and comforting when the poem glides into the unknown: “all the world thick with swans” and “it is summer it is winter.” Stumbling upon this poem was a moment of grace and understanding, if such a thing can be said of the understanding of dementia and its stealth. It is so, so difficult to write about dementia without sounding sappy or drippy. Maybe the key to what this is all about is indeed in waves and the soothing nature of water.

Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey. above/ground press, August 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney

Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Kathleen Rooney’s, Where Are the Snows, is dedicated “To the future.” This book of prose-influenced poems seems longer than seventy-three pages. Mainly consisting of long sentences reaching across the page like obsessions, it is beautifully made, with attractive cover and front matter graphics. The Table of Contents seems demure because of its scallop-edged border. Line breaks are not of concern here. Instead, being entertaining is. Underneath the jokes and ironic spins, Rooney blends advice column writing with poetry. Each poem is about a fact or observation and explores every facet as far as the imagination will go. In “The Point in Time or Space At Which Something Originates,” Rooney explores “newness,” the word “new,” and “beginnings.” She writes: “Can beginner’s luck apply from moment to moment? Not sure, but I hope so.” I wouldn’t go as far as saying she uses the techniques of stand-up comedians, but elements are here in what gets turned around. In the poem, “Foretelling the Future by a Randomly Chosen Passage from a Book,” Rooney concludes: “Quick! Somebody give me another assignment. Somebody tell me that what we do matters.” Rooney’s book matters. Laughing during the pain of life matters.

Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney. Texas A&M University Press, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Under the Skin by Linda Villarosa

Under the Skin by Linda Villarosa book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation exposes the overt and hidden racism that runs throughout the healthcare industry, as well as other health-related concerns—such as the influence of social and physical living conditions on mortality. Villarosa draws on the history of health and medicine to show the variety of ways the then-legalized and socially accepted racism continues to affect how healthcare professionals today see people of color, especially African Americans. What was once obvious and intentional is now built into systems, whether that’s the way research privileges the white body or medical technologies continue the bias against Black bodies. One of her main throughlines is how the medical establishment doesn’t listen to African Americans, especially women, and especially mothers. No matter what their socioeconomic status or education level, African Americans have to work to convince those in the healthcare system that their pain is real, that their suffering needs attention. Time and time again, those pleas are ignored, leading to higher rates of mortality among minority communities, again, especially in maternal deaths. Villarosa ends the book by focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she also ends with hope that changes are happening, even amid such continued suffering.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa. Doubleday, May 2023.

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 :: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan’s latest collection of stories is subtitled “stories of women and men.” That could just as well read, “stories of women who are trying to live their lives and men who attempt to thwart them.” The middle of three stories, “The Long and Painful Death,” originally published in 2007, tells of a writer who just wants to use her two weeks at a retreat to produce new work, but one man intrudes upon her solitude. She reverts to societal expectations of what a woman should do to entertain a guest, ruining her day. The final story, “Antarctica,” first published in 1999, is more extreme in the complications that ensue. It’s the title story, though, that is the gem of this strong collection. Keegan published it last year, and it is a story that speaks to the gender dynamics of our time. The premise is simple, as it follows a man who meets a woman, then proposes to her. However, their relationship doesn’t go as planned, and he has the opportunity to learn about the world and women, but he learns exactly the wrong lesson. Keegan’s style, as always, is sparse and powerful, much like Chekhov, her favorite writer (who makes an appearance in the middle story). Keegan creates women who want to craft meaningful lives in the world, but the men who interact with them do their best to prevent those lives from coming to fruition.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan. Grove Press, 2023

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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Book Review :: Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray

Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Good Grief, the Ground, Margaret Ray’s debut collection, “we are in Central Florida.” It is late summer. We are coming of age, making out at the movies, sneaking into a pool, navigating gender tensions and expectations, and “no one is dead yet.” The poet writes personally of “the cusp of childhood” and adulthood and expands socio-politically to “the border / between” a “violent history / of colonialization” and what we “get away with… because” we “are white,” between queer desire and autonomy, between “this woman and wanting” “and wanting to be.” There is “a glow of danger and ferocity pulsing off” Ray’s lines, a ”buzzing-heat-made-into-sound that means” “we change // when we can name things.” But in reality “naming it’s no inoculation against / what happens in every parking lot alone at night.” There are “too many dead women.” In these poems, Ray is the one who carries both her younger and adult selves “across the threshold” where “[c]hildren are made of risk” and “someone says hysterectomy.” Whether we are children or adults, “everything / has always arranged itself into before / and after.” Everyone has to be “fluent in the grammar / of emergency.” The poems emit “the feeling of being ready to go somewhere,” but soon realize “there were never any good exit strategies.” Considering this ground of no exit, do we continue to risk “betting on anything” or do we go about “inoculating … against / hope”? Ray’s poems strive toward “self-sufficient womanhood” to “build the version where memory works,” to “feel at home in this life.” Isn’t that what we all want, dear reader? Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground “sparkles with impermanence,” “the most delicious tingling.”

Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray. BOA Editions Ltd., April 2023

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.

Book Review :: Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:

[. . . ] movies
on repeat. ice cream on repeat.
dinner at bedtime. toys kept in
Crown Royale bags.

At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:

[. . . ] her eyes lit like
bright swans when her mouth
formed the words.

I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean. above/ground press, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Book Review :: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, like other neo-slave narratives—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer— uses the mystical and the magical in her portrayal of slavery. Annis is separated from her mother and sold further South into even more brutal conditions. One way she survives is by drawing on the spirits of wind, water, and earth, as well as her ancestors. However, Ward doesn’t use these supernatural elements to make Annis’ existence easier; in fact, Annis often argues with these spirits about what they have done and where they have failed her or her family. Annis must ultimately rely on herself and those around her in order to survive and find a way to exist in a brutal system that consistently tries to break every bond she has, including the one with herself. Ward focuses more on the psychological and emotional effects of slavery than she does the physical abuse, though that’s certainly present. She is more concerned with Annis’ inner life and her relationships with her family and others who are enslaved than she is with recreating the brutality of the system. She ultimately wants to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit rather than relying on the supernatural spirits to provide an unrealistic survival for Annis.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. Scribner, October 2023.

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