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

Kursid Kids by Ronan Russell book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glitter Road by January Gill O'Neil book cover image

Review by Lauren Crawford

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: The Poet’s Guide to Publishing

cover of The Poet's Guide to Publishing by Katerina Stoykova

The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry, Nonfiction by Katerina Stoykova

McFarland, August 2024

This guide to publishing poetry is designed for the poet on a journey from facing a pile of poems to celebrating at a book launch. If you have been writing poetry for some time and have accumulated a volume of work, this guide is designed to meet you where you are in your book creation or publication process. It is organized into five sections to mimic the distinct phases of conceiving, arranging, editing, publishing, and promoting a poetry collection. Each section provides a mix of theoretical materials and practical assignments to demystify and ground the publication process.

Book Review :: American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Book :: 90 Ways of Community: Nurturing Safe & Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time

90 Ways of Community book cover image

90 Ways of Community: Nurturing Safe & Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time by Sarah J Donovan, Mo Daley, Maureen Young Ingram
Seela Books, September 2024

For writing poetry in grades 6-12, this indispensable resource guides teachers through a year-long journey of poetic engagement, fostering a safe and inclusive environment where every student feels valued and heard. Grounded in social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogy, the authors provide practical, adaptable lessons that seamlessly integrate poetry writing into any curriculum.

With a clear framework developed by experienced educators, 90 Ways of Community is designed for teachers at all levels, from novices to veterans. Each chapter begins with a heartfelt “Dear Teacher” letter, offering context and support, while thematic clusters of prompts inspire creativity and connection. The book covers a wide range of topics, from celebrating individuality to extending community and healing through poetic expression. The authors draw on real classroom experiences and the collective wisdom of a community of teacher-poets.

90 Ways of Community is more than a collection of prompts—it’s a roadmap to building a classroom culture where poetry becomes a vital tool for learning and growth. Join in nurturing the hearts and minds of students, one poem at a time.

A free digital version is available at www.ethicalela.com/store

Book Review :: Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Dog and Monsters by Mark Haddon book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Choice :: The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County

The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County by I.M. Aiken book cover image

The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County by I.M. Aiken
Flare Books / Catalyst Press, September 2024

Informing the storyline for The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, I.M. Aiken worked on ambulances off and on since the 1980s, starting in the Boston area where she was born and raised. She served one tour in Iraq with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and now lives in Vermont.

This novel is based on her 40 years of work in the paramedic field and centers on main character Alex Flynn. Following in the footsteps of their beloved Boston cop father, Alex trains as an EMT and spends years chasing emergencies in an ambulance. But the person Alex becomes is a far cry from the hero they signed up to be.

Over four decades in public safety, Alex encounters a changing America, where veterans are left to rot on streets, women are welcome in dangerous fields but abusers still walk free, and service providers are subjected to intense public scrutiny while being denied the resources they need. After moving from bustling Boston to small town Vermont, Alex discovers an escalating feud between emergency operators and must decide which to protect: their community or their legacy.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton

Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Books August 2024

Pixabay image by go_see photograph of a woman lying in the grass holding a book above her face reading

Still plenty of time to enjoy summer reading. To help you achieve that goal, check out the August 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.

If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

[Image by go_see from Pixabay]

Book Review :: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

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

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

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

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

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota. Viking, 2024.

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

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

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

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

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

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

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

But why all this momentum?

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

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

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

Book Review :: Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce

Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce book cover image

Review by Jennifer Brough

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near Where the Blood Pools by Ben Terry book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review :: The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer

The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review :: Bear by Julia Phillips

Bear by Julia Phillips book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The epigraph of Bear comes from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about Snow-white and Rose-red, setting up Phillips’ modern-day fairy tale about two sisters, so readers should expect a bit of the fantastic. Given the echoes of fairy tales that run throughout the novel, the reader might expect the bear of the title to serve as a symbol or metaphor, perhaps even turning the story into an allegory. However, Phillips avoids that trap, focusing instead on the relationship between Sam and Elena, two sisters roughly a year and a half apart in age. Or, at least, she focuses on Sam’s view of that relationship, as readers get her thoughts on life, but not Elena’s.

They live on an island off the coast of Washington that relies on tourism, and they are struggling to survive. Their mother is sick after years of working in a nail salon, so they have accumulated serious debt. They both have service industry jobs—Elena at the country club and Sam selling concessions on the ferry—leaving them with only the house as an asset, the house where their grandmother lived, then their mother, and now them. Sam is waiting until their mother dies, so they can sell the house and leave the island forever.

In the midst of their day-to-day lives, a bear arrives—an oddity on their island—and they react in opposite ways to its appearance. Their reactions drive the plot, revealing more about them than the reader and they, perhaps, know. Some fairy tales end with a “happily ever after,” leading readers to wonder whether the sisters’ relationship will ever be the same again.

Bear by Julia Phillips. Hogarth, June 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 :: In Violet by Margo LaPierre

In Violet by Margo LaPierre book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In violet. Inviolate. In her chapbook In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings her attention to homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. From that fine line between sound and definition, the poet inquires: How does a person who has been violated refrain from perpetrating violation? In other words, how does a person committed to nonviolence conduct herself in a violent world?

In Violet’s ten poems are offered to the reader at a conceptual and analytic vantage from the speaker’s traumatic past. The speaker seems to have acknowledged the “system of stress” and has passed into the rage phase. The rage may be rightful and only natural, but it is what is “gripping the body.” The speaker is comfortable enough taking revenge against “all [her] rapists” in her dreams, but fantasizing about it during waking hours causes discomfort. As a result, she seems to switch focus to the “ones [she’s] hurt.” Such is the despairing struggle between “snuffed” and “saved” in the aftermath of trauma. Yet, each phase of recovery is necessary, all of it together a “healing spell.”

On the pages of In Violet, Margo LaPierre brings to color what “lays years upon [a] body” and the lagging “effects of / the stressor.” In the process, the poems of In Violet take some steps away from “villainy.”

In Violet by Margo LaPierre. Anstruther Press, 2024.

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

Book Review :: Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis is an inspirational text, reminding us that we can do something about gentrification, sky-high rents, and deteriorated living conditions. Although it is short on practical details, the book offers readers an upbeat look at how tenants can amass power by organizing their buildings and then branching out to organize city blocks, as well as whole neighborhoods and even cities. The goal? Better code enforcement, investment in neighborhoods, and controls on rent increases.

Both authors are involved in the Los Angeles Tenants Union and draw on examples of successful organizing to forestall evictions, lower rents, and improve living conditions. But while the book doesn’t address the cost of housing maintenance—that is, if housing was not privately owned and a source of profit, would the government be responsible for providing upkeep and other services? Would the tenants form co-ops and each pay their share of the total?

Despite these deficits, Abolish Rent offers a keenly-drawn alternative to housing for personal gain, with landlords literally operating as Lords of the Land and profiting from their investments. Yes, rent is too damned high, and Abolish Rent reminds us that we can win affordable and accessible housing if we organize to demand it.

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Haymarket Books. September 2024.

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

Book Review :: The Monsoon War by Bina Shah

The Monsoon War by Bina Shah book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

This novel is the second (and possibly last) book in a series Shah began with While She Sleeps. It’s not necessary to have read the first novel to understand this one, though doing so would provide more depth and background on the world Shah has created. While She Sleeps focuses on life in The Green City (a fictional city in what seems to be Southwest Asia). Here, women have multiple husbands due to a nuclear war outside their country, which led to the Virus, which has led to women’s being unable to produce many children who survive. That novel focused on survival, especially for a small group of women who live in the Panah (sanctuary) underground. They serve as companions for the powerful men, not providing sex, but merely lying with the men until they fall asleep, offering an intimacy that has become absent from society.

In The Monsoon War, Shah focuses on resistance, as she moves the action to the mountains outside The Green City. This novel follows three different women—Alia, a wife to three husbands; Katy, a fighter in the Hamiyat (an all-female freedom fighter group); and Fatima Kara, a Commander of one of the Hamiyat units. Instead of merely surviving, these women find ways to try overthrowing the government, risking their lives in open rebellion (unlike the women of the Panah, who risked their lives in more subtle means of rebellion). In fact, all of the villages of the mountain have been quietly rebelling, as they raised their female daughters as male to avoid their being taken by the government and forced to be wives.

Shah points out in her acknowledgements that she drew on female fighters from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Columbia for much of the inspiration for this work, but she also acknowledges that women throughout the world resist patriarchal domination in a variety of ways. Through this novel, she celebrates that diversity, while reminding readers the work of rebellion is far from done.

The Monsoon War by Bina Shah. Delphinium Books, 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 :: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy’s most recent novel, is clear-eyed in its portrayal of motherhood, especially during the challenging first few years. The mother in this work—known only as Soldier—addresses her son—the Sailor of the title—throughout, explaining to him why she behaved the way she did when he was younger. She tells him that she used to be a different person, and she will be a different person again, but the sleep deprivation and constant demands of raising a young child have changed her, especially in her inability to think clearly.

She could be different if her husband helped with any aspect of her life, whether that’s directly taking care of their son or cooking dinner or doing absolutely anything to make her days easier. Not only does he not help her, he seems oblivious to her feelings and her state of being, and he definitely doesn’t notice the change their marriage has undergone.

Kilroy provides a contrast to Soldier’s husband in a friend she runs into at the playground, somebody who knew her before she had a son, a man who’s taking care of his three children, while his wife works as a doctor. Through that juxtaposition, the reader can clearly see that Kilroy isn’t critiquing men, in general, but the vast majority of them who do little to nothing to participate in the care of their children.

Her main focus, though, is simply on the realities of being a mother, one day after another, with all of the constant demands and the lack of appreciation. That focus is more than enough and more than needed.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. Scribner, June 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 :: Stealing by Margaret Verble

Stealing by Margaret Verble book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Verble’s latest novel has multiple meanings throughout the work, ranging from the stealing up on somebody when they’re unaware to the theft of land that occurred when colonizers landed on North America to the life that the main character feels has been stolen from her.

Kit, a twelve-year-old Native American girl living in the middle part of the 20th century, tells the story of her life, ranging from when she was six, when her mother died of tuberculosis, to her current situation in a boarding school. That span covers a number of ways Indigenous people have continued to suffer from the colonization of their land. Her mother’s death reveals the poor healthcare; her Uncle Joe is an alcoholic, which ultimately leads to his death; his father, even though he served honorably in World War II (several people in town refer to him as a “war hero”), finds himself in a difficult legal situation due to Kit’s relationship with a new neighbor, Bella; the court puts Kit in a boarding school rather than with her family, trusting the state over her true relations.

Readers who are aware of what Native American children suffered at those schools won’t be surprised by what happens to Kit and her peers there. What they might be surprised by, though, is Kit’s resilience. As her relatives consistently remind her, they survived the Trail of Tears, so they can survive anything. Though the dominant white society tries to steal everything Kit values, she holds her true self in her heart, where nobody and nothing is able to take it away from her.

Stealing by Margaret Verble. Mariner Books, 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 :: à genoux by Morgan Christie

à genoux by Morgan Christie book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook à genoux, the “soft words” of Morgan Christie’s poems respond to Virginia Chihota’s intimate, folkloric artworks. à genoux, from the French “on one’s knees,” is the focus of both the poet and the artist who consider the various reasons and calls to bend a knee, ranging from protest to prayer.

Which gesture of kneeling has to do with willing supplication and which power dynamics?

how soundly the reason fumbles
from the tellings and retellings

they all took knees before
but only when they were told (“—white lines”)

When we “hear someone yell / get down on your knees” we know we are not being told “to pray.” To “recognize the distinction” between “having to bend” and wanting to “means to understand the sacred.” Ultimately, “longing for what is ours is why we keel.”

As Christie is brought to her knees by the history of subjugation, she bows to the strength of family. When “we think of kneeling / we don’t have to be on our own.”

Indeed, in à genoux, Morgan Christie and Virginia Chihota “kneel together” as “the truths” of their words and colors draw a warm “blended bath / of change.”

Gentle Reader, regardless of what Auden wrote, together Morgan Christie’s poetry and Virginia Chihota’s paintings make something happen. So does Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, who made this stunning, full-color chapbook!

à genoux by Morgan Christie; artwork by Virginia Chihota. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, April 2023.

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

Add Indie Bookstores to Your Summer Adventures

storefront and interior photograph of The Booksmiths Shoppe located in Danbury, Connecticut

NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a frequently updated resource for finding local independent bookstores that offer curated selections, personalized recommendations, and unique atmospheres. Bookstores are also the hub of local communities, sharing their space to host cultural events and social efforts.

For authors and publishers, our list is a goldmine of opportunities for finding sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books. Indie bookstores network their local literary scenes, connecting writers directly with their audience.

NewPages.com currently lists only brick-and-mortar stores (no online-only, pop-up, mobile, comics-only shops, or shops with books as a side business). We offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help booksellers connect with book lovers.

If we’re missing any stores you know about, drop us a note!

[Thanks to our friends at The Booksmiths Shoppe in Danbury, CT, for the lovely photo! If you’d like to see your bookstore featured here, click the ‘drop us a note’ link above.]

Sponsored :: New Book :: Pulp into Paper

front cover of Pulp into Paper by Lenore Weiss

Pulp into Paper: A Novel, Fiction by Lenore Weiss

Atmosphere Press, April 2024

In the close-knit community of Hentsbury, racism and the local paper mill’s oppressive control over the town collide in a gripping tale set in the 1990s in southern Arkansas along the fictional Mud River.

Rae-Ann, owner of a convenience store and unofficial mayor of Hentsbury, finds her life intertwined with Vernon’s when a budding romance between them hits an unexpected roadblock. Their love story takes an abrupt turn when chemicals from the mill’s runoff claim the life of Rincon, a young black boy battling acute asthma. In a harrowing failed rescue attempt, Vernon, the plant’s Environmental Officer, relives the trauma of holding the dying boy in his arms.

As the community grapples with this tragedy, Vernon stumbles upon a back-door deal between state and local officials who ask him to suppress critical information about the mill’s dangerous hydrogen sulfide emissions. With the rising tensions, Rae-Ann begins to question whether Vernon will stand by his principles.

In the end, it’s Rincon’s determined grandmother, along with Rae-Ann and her older sister, who rallies the town to take action. Their efforts lead to the arrival of an EPA investigatory team, but not without consequences. When the dust settles, Vernon loses his job, but he and Rae-Ann embark on a new chapter in life together.

Book Review :: Corridors of Contagion by Victoria Law

Corridors of Contagion by Victoria Law book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Longtime prison-abolition activist and writer Victoria Law’s latest book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, tells a maddening story. As a chronicle of bad public policy, it charts the ways public health warnings were ignored by prison administrators who allowed–and likely still allow–overcrowding, a lack of ventilation, and medical neglect to exacerbate the spread of the fast-moving COVID virus. The upshot is that countless severe, and sometimes long-term, illnesses and deaths have occurred.

Law introduces these dire facts by telling the stories of five diverse incarcerated people, all of whom have a lot to say about COVID and medical inequities. Their accounts make the political personal. Moreover, they expose the fallacy of rehabilitation and highlight the near-continual abuse and arbitrary exertion of authority they’ve encountered. But their statements are more than an enumeration of negative experiences, and Law showcases the ways that prisoners have rallied around one another, sharing food, medicine, and other resources to lessen COVID’s impact. It’s a moving show of solidarity.

Corridors of Contagion centers the humanity of those in lock-up and ends with an impassioned plea not only for prison reform but for a completely different system of justice. Indeed, Law calls on lawmakers “to shed the carcasses of racism, poverty, patriarchy and the ills that fuel its addiction to perpetual punishment.”

Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration by Victoria Law. Haymarket Books, September 2024 (pre-order available).

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

Book Review :: Open Leaves by Harryette Mullen

Open Leaves by Harryette Mullen book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In this gorgeous Black Sunflowers Poetry Press poet and artist series chapbook, Harryette Mullen’s haiku and essayettes grow in a garden of delights and despairs along with Tiffanie Delune’s lush floral tableaus.

Mullen’s Open Leaves: poems from earth is a study and choice of attention:

Every flower a
reminder of all that we
miss when not looking.

Of course, where there are gardens, there are plants, their watering and growth, hungry grasshoppers, and a “Kneeling gardener.”

Given the rapaciousness encouraged by the business magnates who brought to society PayPal, Tesla, Amazon, etc., in this context gardening is resistance. And, it is the insistence on connection—to family and Earth.

In Mullen’s poems, gardening is connected especially to the strong women in her family: “Somehow, after he’d left, and his father had died, his mother held on to their acres, even during the Great Depression, and beyond.” Great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother taught her: “You won’t starve if you can grow your own food. If you take care of your green patch, it will take care of you.”

Despite “snagged skin, / bruised fruit, hurt feelings,” gardening offers Mullen a sense of being “Firmly planted here” and a place for sustaining inquiry and her life: “When she scoops a handful of black earth, she thinks of living things that keep the soil alive.”

Gentle Reader, read these poems, and your heart blossoms, your soul alive!

Open Leaves: poems from earth by Harryette Mullen; artwork by Tiffanie Delune. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, March 2023.

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

Book Review :: Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman

Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman book cover image

Review by Catherine Hayes

Leah Angstman transports her readers to the perilous and fractured world of French Revolution-era Paris in her new novel Falcon in the Dive, where everyone has secrets and trust was a luxury that few could afford.

The book follows the story of Ani, an intelligent and resourceful teenage orphan struggling to survive on the streets of Paris after her family lost their wealth and status due to the selfishness and greed of the Beaumercy family. Now left with nothing but a burning anger and a desire for revenge, she finds herself being recruited by members of the revolution to infiltrate and spy on members of aristocracy–a mission she simply can’t refuse. What follows this decision is a twisting tale of secrets, betrayal, and a star-crossed love.

Angstman’s second full-length novel is a refreshing take on a historical subject that has been such a popular topic in the media it has become borderline ad nauseam. Angstman’s Paris is a dark and gritty one, a place highlighting the impact which the corruption of power has on those ‘without.’ She attempts to deconstruct the villainy that has so often surrounded the lower class population of Paris, especially in media pieces focusing on the tragedy of Marie Antoinette, and gives a voice to those who have long been forgotten by history.

Angstman does a marvelous job of adding complexity to her characters, showing them in moments of happiness and peace to moments of insecurity, doubt, and moral ambiguity. The lack of fear she exhibits in examining the multifaceted nature of humanity and the will to survive in difficult circumstances makes Angstman’s novel truly authentic in its portrayal of the French Revolution. She has once again proven herself to be a master of historical fiction.

Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman. Regal House Publishing, January 2023.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Blood & Thunder: Musings of the Art of Medicine, Atticus Review, NewPages, and an anthology with Wising up Press. She can be found on Twitter @Catheri91642131

Book Review :: The Word for Standing Alone in a Field by J.I. Kleinberg

The Word for Standing Alone in a Field by J.I. Kleinberg book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her chapbook, The Word for Standing Alone in a Field, J.I. Kleinberg invites readers to consider a scarecrow’s agency and makes effective use of pathetic fallacy. After all, what is a scarecrow but an “effigy,” a “straw man,” a stand-in for a human? It would be fairly presumptuous then to assume a scarecrow does not have human emotions.

Kleinberg’s scarecrow is an “only human” “placeholder / / for grief.” “His work / not crows or corn but sorrows.” He is also a good friend and sage to another with whom he is in constant dialogue throughout the poems. This other, “a shadow looking for a body,” is someone the scarecrow “show[s] how to speak” and to whom” he “asks… about bones” and “skin.”

During the reading of the twenty-eight linked poems, an affecting tenderness grows between these two beings “in the church of corn.” One holds the other as “he wept” and they share their “earliest / memory.” This reader accepted the intimacy between them as “inevitable as dawn.”

In the end, I wanted nothing more than to “stand beside the scarecrow / and look where he looks, / / across the feathered gold / and green.”

Despite its title, Dear Reader, J.I. Kleinberg’s The Word for Standing Alone offers us loving company, tender acceptance, and true respite.

The Word for Standing Alone in a Field by J.I. Kleinberg. Bottlecap Press, September 2023.

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

Book Review :: Also Here by Brooke Randel

Also Here by Brooke Randel book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Brooke Randel was in her early 20s, her grandmother, Golda Indig, known as Bubbie, called her and suggested that she write about her life: “What happened in the war…You know, a young girl in the camps.” The request was jarring since Randel’s family had generally sidestepped discussions of the Holocaust, instead fixating on the present, with food, family, and holiday celebrations taking center stage. But Randel was intrigued and began interviewing Bubbie.

Surprisingly, the process was more difficult than she expected, for not only was Bubbie’s story filled with vague and random anecdotes, but it unfolded in fits-and-starts that were complicated by her illiteracy, easy distractibility, and memory gaps. Nonetheless, Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust chronicles Bubbie’s traumatic deportation to Auschwitz as a 13-year-old and describes her transfer to Bergen-Belsen before being liberated by American soldiers; her eventual emigration to the US adds a riveting dimension to Bubbie’s tale.

In addition, the book veers into Randel’s own story – with details about her nine-year search for data to support Bubbie’s account – that are well-woven into the memoir. This makes Also Here unusual, as much about writing and research as it is about a love-filled but fraught inter-generational relationship. An emotionally resonant and compelling debut.

Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust by Brooke Randel, Tortoise Books, December 2024 (pre-order available).

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: Wrongland

cover of Wrongland by Gazmend Kapllani, translated by Peter Bien

Wrongland, Fiction by Gazmend Kapllani

Translated from the Greek by Peter Bien

Laertes Press/Egret Fiction, September 2024

Wrongland balances on an edge of migration and return. It crosses from an Albania recently rid of Hoxha to a Greece riven by tensions that ultimately drive the protagonist on to America. But homecoming is the pivot — one stuck in an unavoidable vying between alternate worlds.  

The reader, a simple stranger, is introduced to Ters, a city configured by remnants from the past, a locale scored by evil — at times, gripped by good.

Gazmend Kapllani is the author of two collections of poetry in Albanian and four published novels (written in Greek and Albanian). His literary work centers on borders, totalitarianism, migration, identity, and how Balkan history has shaped private and public narratives and memories.

Book Review :: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Judith Butler is known primarily as a gender theoretician and philosopher, most famous for her 1990 book Gender Trouble. Her latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, presents as more accessible than her previous writings, published by a trade publisher, as opposed to an academic press. Saying that this work is more accessible than her more theoretical work, though, is akin to a weekend tennis player stating that they’re only playing the 100th best tennis player in the world, not somebody in the top 10. That’s not a criticism of the book, just a heads-up for readers.

Butler crafts a nuanced argument against those who claim to oppose “gender,” which encompasses much more than the LGBTQIA+ community to include what some politicians call “woke culture”; thus, Butler explores race, colonialism, and abortion rights, among other ideas. Butler methodically goes after religious groups, especially the Catholic church, who claim that “gender” is an assault on the natural order, but they also break down the arguments of the politicians and the state, as well as the TERFs (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” though they prefer the term “gender-critical”).

Ultimately, they point out that all of these groups are threatened by everything they put under the umbrella of “gender,” as they ultimately want to curtail or take away altogether the rights and freedoms of groups with whom they disagree. Butler shows that these groups believe that somebody else’s freedoms will limit theirs. Butler reveals their fear, not just the flaws in their arguments.

Butler ends, though, on a positive note, as they argue for alliances between the groups that get sorted under the “gender” umbrella, pointing out that all these groups value freedom and that freedom for one group will lead to more freedom for others. They try to imagine a different world than the current world, an optimistic conclusion to redefine how readers see others.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 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 :: A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh

A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

A Sign of Her Own, Sarah Marsh’s debut novel, follows Ellen Lark, a girl who lost her hearing when she was four due to Scarlet Fever. Her mother and paternal grandmother—her father worked away from the family, then died—send her to school, then to work with Alexander Graham Bell, to learn lip-reading and Visible Speech, a phonetic means of pronunciation. Essentially, they want her to be able to pass as a person who is able to hear others.

Ellen fully embraces this approach, though there are hints of dissatisfaction early in the novel, even before she works with Bell. That unhappiness becomes fully developed when she meets Frank, as he grew up in a largely Deaf family—his mother is the exception—and community. She sees the joy of communication they have with one another, not through trying to imitate those who are able to hear, but by fully embracing their culture, especially signing.

Bell’s work on the telephone is in the background throughout the novel, especially the possibility that he stole the idea from Elisha Gray, reinforcing the overall idea of (mis)communication and (missed) connections. Ellen’s lip-reading often leads to misinterpretation, and numerous characters accidentally or willfully misunderstand each other.

Marsh clearly portrays the Deaf community’s internal conflict over signing versus lip-reading/English (heightened by external actors, such as Bell). Ellen has to learn who she is and who she wants to be, which will ultimately help her find the community she needs.

A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh. Park Row Books, 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

Editor’s Choice :: Home, Rewritten Anthology

Home Rewritten anthology cover image

Home, Rewritten: Celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Voices
Fleeting Daze Magazine, May 2024

“Created in 1992, AAPI Heritage Month celebrates the immense culture and history fostered in the AAPI community. With the growing population of the AAPI community, AAPI media has been embedded into American society and heavily influenced its culture. However, AAPI artists constantly face stigmatization and microaggression in their work, especially when Asian artists deviate from the traditional ‘Asian ideal.’ This unwelcoming environment diminishes the diverse voices representing the AAPI community, leaving the American population vulnerable to homogeneity and narrow-mindedness. As editors-in-chief stemming from an AAPI background, we felt motivated to use the platform we’ve created to uplift AAPI youth voices undermined in society. We realized that allowing Asian artists to express their heritage genuinely and candidly brings true representation that society is working towards.”

“This project has been a long time in the making,” say Editors-in-Chief Rosie Hong and Caroline Zhang, “and we are so proud to be able to highlight AAPI voices and share with the world how we have redefined our homes and families through our experiences growing up.”

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: We Loved It All by Lydia Millet

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Besides being an award-winning writer, Millet has worked at the Center for Biological Diversity for roughly twenty-five years. In We Loved it All: A Memoir of Life, she combines those two areas of expertise to create a poetic, meditative book that explores climate change, storytelling, hope, and despair.

However, Millet is not making an argument here, so much as she is simply sharing her love of nature and animals, celebrating the beauty and wonder of the world, in the hopes that others will see and appreciate the awesome diversity she recognizes. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to offer any practical solutions—though there are a few in the final essay. She believes that, if people love the world the way she and so many others do, they would make the necessary changes in their lives, in their policies, and in their corporate decisions to change the world.

Given Millet’s work as a writer, her approach to language is both beautiful itself and ironic. She writes each essay—there are three, roughly eighty pages or so long—in short sections, ranging from one sentence to a few pages, using fragments to provide a fractured, imagistic tone. She talks about the importance of bearing witness and telling stories to help shape the ways in which we see the world.

She also admits the limitations of language to both explain the scope of the problem and provide solutions, even acknowledging that the world will outlive our words. In the meantime, though, her language calls us, as best as it can, to truly see the world around us and love it all, hoping beyond despair that love will be the beginning of enough.

We Loved It All by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, 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 :: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Enter Ghost, the title of Hammad’s second novel, refers to the stage directions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of which serves as a metaphor throughout the work. Sonia is a British citizen with Palestinian heritage, working in London as an actor. While her career has never elevated to the top ranks, she has consistently had work. She feels a bit stuck, though, partly due to her career, but also partly due to an affair with a married theatre director, so she leaves England, supposedly to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa.

While there, she meets Marisa, a friend of her sister and a theatre director, who convinces Sonia to play Gertrude in a production of Hamlet. Sonia, as well as the other characters, are haunted by a number of ghosts from their past. There are the personal ghosts—such as Sonia’s affair—the breakdown of Sonia and Haneen’s family, and Sonia’s career.

However, the most significant ghost is the Palestinian past that has led to the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Throughout the novel, Haneen and Sonia refer back to their father’s involvement in anti-Israel activities, and it’s a visit to the West Bank that has led Haneen to live in Israel, as opposed to London, where her father and sister live.

The Israeli government and army are constantly watching the play to see if it contains anti-Israeli ideas, leading to the real possibility that they could shut down the performance. Sonia ultimately learns more about herself, her family, and Palestine, but she also finds true community through the production, as Hammad reminds readers of the power of art, even in the midst of war and suffering.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Grove Atlantic, April 2024.

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

Book Review :: That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones

That Librarian by Amanda Jones book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian and head of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, spoke before the Livingston Parish Library Board in August 2022, she did so as a concerned community member. Her message was clear and direct: Diverse collections must include books that accurately address U.S. history and offer readers multiple ways to understand race, class, gender, sexuality, and sexual identity. The latter category, she said, is especially important for children, adolescents, and teens as they navigate coming of age.

Although Jones was not the only person to express this viewpoint, four days after she testified she found herself on the receiving end of a well-organized hate-and-harassment campaign coordinated by Citizens for a New Louisiana, a newly-formed conservative group that dubbed her a pornographer and menace to children.

That Librarian, part memoir, part impassioned political argument against censorship and book bans, is a deeply felt exposition of the physical and emotional toll these smears exacted and a strategic workbook about ways for communities to fight back. Moreover, it charts Jones’s personal transformation from a 2016 Trump supporter to become a forceful advocate for civil rights, civil liberties, and the right to read. It’s a powerful, angry, and inspiring book.

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones. Bloomsbury Publishing, August 2024 (pre-order available).

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

Book Review :: Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Choice by Neel Mukherjee book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Neel Mukherjee’s most recent novel, Choice, tells a triptych of tales, all tangentially related to one another and all, not surprisingly, centered around the idea of choice. The first story follows Ayush, an editor at a publishing house where the focus has shifted from books and authors to profits. He is also not merely concerned with climate change, but obsessed with it, to the point that it disrupts his relationships with his husband, Luke, and their two children. He consistently repeats, as narrator, that one must change their life, which leads him to an important decision.

The second part follows Emily, a professor at a school that might be the same one Luke works at (or this story could be a story from a collection that Ayush publishes), though that’s left unclear. Emily takes a ride share home one evening, and the driver might have hit something and/or someone, though Emily didn’t see clearly, given that she was both drunk and digging around the floor of the vehicle for her dropped phone. Rather than going to the police, though, she gets to know the driver, Salim, and learns his story and his family’s story, as they immigrated from Eritrea, leading Emily to make a radical life choice.

The final section tells the story of Sabita, a woman living on the border of West Bengal and Bangladesh, and is most likely a response one of Luke’s fellow economics professors gives to Ayush when he asks about her work on poverty. Sabita and her family receive a cow as part of an experiment to see if a change in assets can change one’s level of poverty. Unlike the other respondents in the experiment, the situation does not go well.

Ultimately, Mukherjee’s novel asks the question of how one should live in the twenty-first century, especially around how one can do good in such a complex world. Mukherjee leaves the reader with that question, as he knows there are no easy answers.

Choice by Neel Mukherjee. W.W. Norton, April 2024.

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

Editor’s Choice :: White Poverty

White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove book cover image

White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Liveright / W. W. Norton, June 2024

One of the most pernicious and persistent myths in the United States is the association of Black skin with poverty. Though there are forty million more poor white people than Black people, most Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to think of poverty—along with issues like welfare, unemployment, and food stamps—as solely a Black problem. Why is this so? What are the historical causes? And what are the political consequences that result?

These are among the questions that the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a leading advocate for the rights of the poor and the “closest person we have to Dr. King” (Cornel West), addresses in White Poverty, a groundbreaking work that exposes a legacy of historical myths that continue to define both white and Black people, creating in the process what might seem like an insuperable divide. Analyzing what has changed since the 1930s, when the face of American poverty was white, Barber, along with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.

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Book Review :: Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Brotherless Night, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Women’s-Prize-winning novel, clearly portrays the horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1980s and following. Sashi is a teenager when the book opens, and the book follows her over the next decade or so as the civil war affects every aspect of her life. She has four brothers, all of whom have some relationship to the war; the title of the novel, in fact, refers to the first night she spent without at least one of her brothers present, and it represents the beginning of the war.

Sashi works in a field hospital for the Tamil rebels, mainly due to the request of K., a childhood friend she would have married, if not for the war. Ganeshananthan portrays the horrific actions of the Sri Lankan and Indian government armies, but she also clearly conveys what the Tamil rebels do, not only to those government soldiers, but also to the civilian population and other rebel groups.

No entity is innocent here, and Sashi reflects that complexity. Though she disagrees with the Tamil Tigers’ actions, she works in the field hospital to try to make sure nobody dies for lack of medical care. She also works to expose the immoral actions they have taken. Ganeshananthan draws heavily on research, even basing one of Sashi’s professors on a real professor and activist, but it is the humanizing portrayal of the wide range of characters that gives this novel its power. Her care for her characters reflects the suffering so many endured throughout the years of the war, showing the reader just how much so many have lost, while their care for each other reveals how much humanity remains.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Random House, 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

Unsolicited Press Is Releasing Literary Fiction that Challenges and Inspires You

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Unsolicited Press is set to release enchanting literary fiction this year including THE HEDGEROW by Anne Leigh Parrish, LINES by Sung J. Woo, and DEVIL ON MY TRAIL by Danial DiFranco. See our flyer and learn more at our website.

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Book Review :: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

There’s not much plot to Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel—eight girls engage in a boxing tournament in a run-down gym in Reno, Nevada—but that’s not the point. The novel is largely structured around each fight with chapters getting progressively shorter and each focusing more on the lives and psychology of the two girls involved in the fight than on what actually happens in the fight itself.

There is a line from The Matrix: Reloaded, where Seraph, the character whose job it is to guard the oracle, fights Neo. When he explains to Neo that he had to know that Neo wasn’t an enemy, Neo responds, “You could’ve just asked.” Seraph replies, “No. You do not truly know someone until you fight them.” These eight girls seem to understand each other better than anybody in their lives, and they come to an understanding of themselves, because they fight.

None of them go on to box in the remainder of their lives, some of them even forgetting about this time in their lives, but their understanding of themselves remains. Boxing serves as a metaphor for the lineage of women understanding one another in this world, as they move in concert with one another, responding to one another, partners in a dance that will carry them through their lives.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel. Viking, 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 :: Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman

Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Wonder About The, Matthew Cooperman “presents / / a spilling presence” of Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River:

Like an open vein, like a sluiced giant, it rolls on through cottonwood
     and willow body, through thistle and rabbit brush, grama and
          blue stem, through drought and illusion, it rolls on
               beyond us, the river flayed in moonlight (“Thesis”)

Cooperman’s eco- and documentary poetic “pulses in… / a rhythm” of “fluid” enactment, environmental activism, and river ecology, “palimpsesting” on water flow reports, geological surveys, “Colorado homesteading history,” environmental impact studies, and a Colorado oil and gas industry “Well Prediction Map.” Throughout the collection’s three sections, the poems roll like a river lyrically, fragmentarily, and narratively freely mixing reportage, collage, and erasure with homage and elegy. Regardless of their poetic mode or compositional method ultimately the poems aim to “Save the Poudre!”

The poems educate readers about the threats to the waterway’s fragile ecology: “a toil of oil,” the “rhetoric of monuments,” “people on the river,” “lifestyles,” and “progress.” And, the poems raft on inquiry: “what is a river / and what is a season / and what is the reason of oil.” As Cooperman’s poems prompted me to consider “what the river’s for,” I thought about the Diamond-Water Paradox which poses the question: If we need water to survive and we do not need diamonds, why are diamonds expensive and water cheap?

From advocacy and from love, Matthew Cooperman carves a “structure of all / perception” through a channel where the two tributaries of wonder are “alive and shimmering.”

Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman. Middle Creek Publishing, June 2023.

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

Book Review :: Victim by Andrew Boryga

Victim by Andrew Boryga book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, tells the story of Javi, a Puerto Rican living in the Bronx. He does well in school and, through a meeting with a college counselor who’s volunteering at his school, ends up at an elite college, unlike his best friend, Gio, whose life takes a different path. Through that meeting with the counselor, Javi’s life seems to follow a traditional path toward the American success story, but Javi’s means of achieving what he seeks is complicated.

As the title conveys, Javi presents himself as a victim, whether of oppression or violence or racism, embellishing the stories he writes, first for his college newspaper, then for a national magazine. On the one hand, Boryga is satirizing the cult of victimhood, the approach that argues that one should use their stories to evoke pity as a means of accomplishing some goal. However, the ideas that Javi learns in college about systemic racism and other forms of oppression are true, as readers can see in Javi and Gio’s lives.

Javi’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t struggle with real suffering; it’s that he seeks the approval of others, especially via social media, so much that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to obtain that approval. He doesn’t care about the problems he details in his writing; he only cares about himself. His audience is also partly responsible, as the more his stories follow the expected arc of racial and class progress and success, as long as they fit the narrative his audience already believes, the more successful he becomes. Boryga reminds his audience that stories are more complicated than they seem and where the problem lies isn’t as obvious as one might think.

Victim by Andrew Boryga. 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 :: The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone

The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Before The King of Terrors was the title of Jim Johnstone’s 2023 poetry book, it was the title of a 1910 Sunday sermon preached by Henry Scott Holland, a 1977 horror novel written by Robert Bloch, and a 2022 horror film directed by Ryan Callaway. Like those before him, Johnstone’s poetry book regards death and its associates, madness and fear.

The poet’s approach is a meditative lyric, “a dream, into a song.” “Fear” is an anaphora, “leading by example” and “running free” throughout the poems. The particular fears have to do with what is “unseen”: “the virus” and “the tumour,” COVID-19 and meningioma. In “parallel / time,” global and personal health crises haunt Johnstone’s poems. In response, the poet seems to be prompted to accept Chronos, assisted by Derrida (“becoming / the always-already absent present”), and to confess to the “ghosts of former lovers.”

In the poem “The Darkroom,” among my favorites for its candor and heart, the poet finds “noun and verb” between apology and prayer to admit:

But I’ve said terrible things about those
whose only mistake was that they weren’t me,
didn’t show up in the mirror where I stared
and stared trying to make sure I was more
and better, where my face would blur
then realign as if hope could change the way
my actions were perceived.

The intimate and “direct nature of [the poet’s] address” in this poem and throughout the book takes the reader into his confidence and illuminates the “interstitial space,” “hovering between two ways”—between “instinct” and “change,” “fragment” and “renunciation,” “a liar” and “a lyre.” In The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone offers readers poems for the uncertain time we “inhabit” “between / age and agency.”

The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone. Coach House Books, September 2023.

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

Book Review :: Permission to Relax by Sheila E. Murphy

Permission to Relax by Sheila E. Murphy book cover image

Review by Jami Marcarty

In Permission to Relax, Sheila E. Murphy vibrates as “Speaker. Language. Mirror.” Murphy’s poems are equally at home at “bake sales” as they are at a “Chaplin festival.” These two locales suggest the compositionally quirky, philosophically comic, and politically potent characteristics of Murphy’s cultural critique that “upends the platitudes.” The poet points out life’s absurdities, relationship tensions, and communication difficulties: “North of probability and vortices, a warm mind / rescues love from common sense.” “Fracture” “repeat[s] … sadness” in the background and foregrounds temporal anxiety: “In a minute, / it will be / tomorrow.”

Murphy’s “span of attention” ranges formally from prose to verse and the poet is equally adept at invented as received forms. The collection includes a “Hay(na)ku Sequence,” “Eight Ghazals,” and “Winter Pantoum.” Some poems act like “a letter with a question mark [slid] under [a] door.” Other poems are a “secret way of holding thought.” Whether “replete with souvenirs” or “homemade” baked goods, the poems of Permission to Relax make an “everworld … tingling.”

Reader, Reader, Sheila E. Murphy is a poet “whose pockets are filled / with permission slips” and “sprezzatura”!

Permission to Relax by Sheila E. Murphy. BlazeVOX [books], August 2023

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

Book Review :: Only Insistence by James Lindsay

Only Insistence by James Lindsay book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In James Lindsay’s Only Insistence a new father to a son is in the throes of “involuntary / reflection” on his relationship with his parents: “What is authority / but anxiety.” The authority within Lindsay’s poems is a “witness” both “apprehensive” and “evasive.” He can tell readers his “mother died, but “can’t speak / as to why.” And, he confesses he doesn’t “know how to talk / about [his] biological father.” That’s personal, “the way life is personal” “and made up / of a terrifying sharpness.”

Sometimes it is easier “to describe the lake: … / the things that float on it / and the things that drown in it that make it what it is.” What is it? It is “the tiny histories that seed memory.”

Memory is both repetition and insistence, “wringing image to solid personal fact.” Here, “as he expresses himself // brutally but beautifully / in how honestly / he carries on,” Lindsay ensures “the Reader and writer / Have [the] kind of relationship” in which “language worked / / Because it was promised.”

Only Insistence by James Lindsay. Goose Lane Editions, September 2023.

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

Book Review :: My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Readers don’t have to have read the first book of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters to understand what happens in book two, as she has enough exposition to bring the reader up to speed. However, reading the first installment (or re-reading it, if it’s been a while) will certainly enable the reader to avoid having to wonder about Karen’s relationship with her brother and her deceased neighbor, Anka, who appears through audiotapes she recorded.

Ferris presents the book as Karen’s sketches on notebook paper, and Karen portrays herself as a werewolf, mainly because she feels like a monster due to her romantic interest in other girls. She draws the world like a horror comic from the 1950s, as she sees the world as a treacherous place. Her brother Deeze seems to be an enforcer for a local mob boss, of sorts, and he may have even worse secrets in his past. Anka tried to rescue girls from the Holocaust, a real horror that Karen sketches based on the tapes.

Karen’s lack of knowledge forces the reader to draw conclusions from the limited information she has, embedding the reader in this world of terror. The artwork is amazing and immensely detailed and colored, which explains why it has taken seven years to get the second volume. While Karen lives in a monstrous world, it’s one that readers will want to live in, hoping that Karen can realize the humanity she exudes.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris. Fantagraphics, May 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 Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Lisa Ko’s second novel follows three Asian-American women—Giselle, Ellen, and Jackie—who meet as teenagers, then remain close for the rest of their lives, though they see each other infrequently. Giselle becomes a performance artist, Ellen transforms a house she and others squatted into a type of communal living space, and Jackie revolutionizes the tech industry, careers and passions that seem far removed from one another.

However, they are all creators of some sort, even artists, though the world seems bent on preventing them from becoming so. They encounter sexism and misogyny, racism, and capitalist expectations, working together and separately to overcome (or simply thwart) those barriers and demands, to find success in their own ways. Ko moves the novel from the 1980s of their teenage years all the way to a future beyond their deaths to explore the ways in which they impact their world and how they become the women they need to be to survive and thrive in that world.

Underneath their different pursuits, they are all trying to answer the same questions that all artists are trying to answer, the questions Giselle knows an interviewer is really asking her: “HOW DO YOU LIVE (HOW DARE YOU LIVE) WHAT DO YOU DO (WHAT SHOULD WE DO) HOW DO WE LIVE HOW DO WE DIE WHAT DO WE NEED TO HEAR.”

Ko’s novel provides three different answers to those questions, but, more importantly, it asks the readers to find the answers in their lives.

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko. Riverhead Books, 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 :: Black AF History by Michael Harriot

Black AF History by Michael Harriot book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Michael Harriot makes the point of Black AF History about as clear as he can in the title. The subtitle—The Un-Whitewashed Story of America—removes any remaining doubt. Some of the history will be familiar to most readers, though the angle Harriot takes won’t be. For example, when he refers to at least one elected official as a serial killer, what he means is that they were an active member in the KKK. He wants readers to see what they think they already know for the reality that it actually is: leaders in the KKK killed numerous Black people, so they’re serial killers. He also presents history that isn’t taught in any high school (or most college) classes, and he does an excellent job of focusing on Black women who aren’t named Rosa or Harriet.

Given that Harriot isn’t an historian by training, his presentation (though not his research) is far from scholarly. At times, his Uncle Rob will supposedly interrupt a chapter and provide a slightly more colorful presentation; there are footnotes that are more side-eyes than clarifications; and there are at least two interviews with Racist Baby, a character that first showed up on Reddit.

He does structure the book like a typical history textbook, though, complete with supplemental materials and end-of-chapter quizzes, though those structural devices are more of a wink-and-nudge than anything else. Overall, Harriot doesn’t want his readers just to be informed; he wants them to be angry AF.

Black AF History by Michael Harriot. Dey Street 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 :: One by Haley Lasché

Review by Jami Macarty

One by Haley Lasche book cover image

In One, Haley Lasché’s debut poetry collection, the poet “claims a bite of language” and invites readers to consider the primacy and implications of “one,” the number and word. Welcome to “imperative’s den”!

Regardless of the part of speech—noun, pronoun, or adjective—the word “one” and its various definitions offer “syntax” and “possibility”; throughout the collection “one” references and “names itself / an unbroken.” But, we are not all in one piece. The meaning of words and their semantic relations lead to inquiry: What are the implications of being “at one with” or “for one”? And, where do harmony and example lead?

One response might be found in the chosen poetic form of the monostich. The one-line stanzas constitute a single moment, observation, or experience within a human body moving within the natural world where it is often nighttime, often cold; human senses awake just as those of the nocturnal possum and owl as the moon comes to light.

Lasché’s synesthetic poetry “is a story told from one eye to the next” from within the “earthen current” where many nights become one night and one within the night becomes one with the night. Where a “spark of voice” joins a “prism of sound,” Haley Lasché’s One is a “song ravenous for light”!

One by Haley Lasché. Beauty School Editions, October 2023.

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