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New Book :: Question from Outer Space

Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel book cover image

Question from Outer Space
Poetry by Diane Thiel
Red Hen Press, May 2022

The newest collection of works by Diane Thiel explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. These poems reflect a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

New Book :: Behind the Tree Backs

Behind the Tree Backs poetry by Iman Mohammed translated by Jennifer Hayashida book cover image

Behind the Tree Backs
Poetry by Iman Mohammed
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2022

Behind the Tree Backs investigates a poetics of remembrance through senses that hover just below and just above the skin. The text excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical. The book insists on a poetics that recall through vibrating auratic fields, violence, love, and sexuality; these sensations tremble and cohere in a musical and tightly composed lyric.

New Book :: Chambers of the Heart

Chambers of the Heart speculative fiction by B. Morris Allen book cover image

Chambers of the Heart
Speculative Fiction by B. Morris Allen
Plant Based Press, April 2022

What happens when an Oregon-based biochemist turned activist turned lawyer turned foreign aid consultant starts penning speculative fiction? In the case of B. Morris Allen, it’s a new collection of stories featuring a heart that’s a building, a dog that’s a program, a woman who’s sinking irretrievably – stories about love, loss, and movement. Allen is also the author of the dark fantasy novel Susurrus and editor of Metaphorosis, a weekly online magazine of “beautifully written” speculative fiction.

New Book :: Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini

Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini Poetry by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt book cover image

Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini
Poetry by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Palooka Press, December 2021

SUNY New Paltz Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita Jan Zlotnik Schmidt’s poetry chapbook Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini brings new light to the complicated life of Bess Houdini and gives voice to this stunning and admirable woman. The collection opens with the biography of Bess Houdini, a class magician in her own right, but sidelined as her husband’s helpmate as his career took the limelight. Following his unexpected death, Bess Houdini attempted many times to restart her career, as well as to connect with her dead husband through séance. In her author’s note, Schmidt explains her research approach to studying the Houdinis and her creation of Bess Houdini’s “state of mind, perspective, and experience” through her poems as “an expansion of the biographical fact.” She further explains, “It is my hope that these poems bring Bess from the margins to the center of the narrative of the great Houdini. For Bess shouldn’t be relegated to being another invisible woman standing in the shadow of the great artist or genius. This volume gives Bess Houdini the space and chance to speak.” It behooves us all to read and breathe life into this effort.

New Book :: The End of Horses

The End of Horses poetry by Margo Taft Stever book cover image

The End of Horses
Poetry by Margo Taft Stever
Broadstone Books, April 2022

In the title poem from this new collection from Margo Taft Stever, she writes “from the end / of the time zone” where “nothing survived / after the horses were slaughtered,” a catastrophe for which no one knows whom to blame, but “The generals / and engineers pucker / and snore on the veranda.” Stever thus offers up a fable of man-made ecological disaster that is in every sense the work of a mature writer, one who has lived long and witnessed much, and who has mastered her craft, here placed in the service of the environment. She devotes much concern to animals – including a discourse on beavers – but her primary subject is humans, and her purpose is to provide readers with cautionary tales on the necessity of ethical living.

Book Review :: House Bird by Robb Fillman

House Bird by Robb Fillman book cover image

Guest Post by Ron Mohring

Reading the poems in House Bird by Robb Fillman, I’m struck first by the conditional, how often the poems express hesitation: “as if,” “almost,” “half-believing,” “grip of hesitation.”

But it’s not doubt the voice expresses, but possibility:

“Then I imagine / what I would do differently” (“Toast”)
“He imagined the way he’d trail them” (“Summer Ending”)
“I see / that what they were offered was not quite / real” (Doo Wop Dream”)

This collection is deeply grounded in familial attachments, in parenthood and the small moments of daily life in and around the home (“My son’s hesitant Yes”) (“Promises”), moments made larger by Fillman’s attention, expanded by his imagination, so that what at first might seem tentative — “Probably by now, my friend / has recovered” (“Witness”) — reveals itself to be the product of close and sustained attention and imagination, the impulse to not only get it down, but to get it right. A fine debut.

House Bird by Robb Fillman. Terrapin Books, February 2022.

Reviewer bio: Ron Mohring is the founding editor of Seven Kitchens Press. His new poetry collection, The Boy Who Reads in the Trees, is forthcoming in 2023 from The Word Works. 

New Book :: Singing at High Altitude

Singing at High Altitude poetry by Jennifer Markell book cover image

Singing at High Altitude
Poetry by Jennifer Markell
Main Street Rag Publishing, November 2021

Jennifer Markell‘s work has appeared in publications including The Bitter Oleander, The Cimarron Review, Consequence Magazine, RHINO, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Women’s Review of Books. She serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club and is a long-standing member of the Jamaica Pond Poets. For the past twenty years, Jennifer has worked in community mental health and as a psychotherapist.

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New Book :: The Discarded Life

The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch book cover image

The Discarded Life
Poetry by Adam Kirsch
Red Hen Press, May 2022

In this fourth collection of poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of an emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

Book Review :: Radio Static by James Hoch

Radio Static by James Hoch book cover image

Guest Post by Carla Sarett

Recently, I have been reading chapbooks, partly as a happy result of submitting my own poetry to small presses. So it was my good fortune to select Radio Static by James Hoch, whose work is new to me. I can’t stop reading it now.   

In this sparse book, Hoch writes of his brother who served a long tour of duty in Afghanistan. (Hoch’s brother served from 2003 to 2021, and is now living in Idaho.) In one gorgeous poem entitled “Afghanistan,” the poet transforms his brother “into a Pashto prayer for what he has done” and Afghanistan into “a cough I clear.” In another poem, “Martins,” Hoch hears the “wind whistling through my brother.” The reader senses the truth of what brothers are, and the horror of what soldiers do and are left with.   

Every war creates its own brand of bitterness, its own unfinished business, and its own poetry. America has quit Afghanistan, but these poems will remind us of the men that war created and forgot. Radio Static will become part of this war’s legacy.

Radio Static by James Hoch. Green Linden Chapbook Series, December 2021.

Reviewer bio: Carla Sarett’s recent poems appear in Pithead Chapel, Quartet Journal, Neologism, and elsewhere. Her novel, A Closet Feminist was published in February 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Carla lives in San Francisco.

New Book :: Future Library

Future Library Contemporary Indian Writing book cover image

Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing
Ed. Anjum Hasan & Sampurna Chattarji
Red Hen Press, July 2022

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

New Book :: Breaking Into Air

Breaking Into Air by Emily Wall book cover image

Breaking Into Air
Poetry by Emily Wall
Boreal Books, June 2022

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories—in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other’s stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other. Published by Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, established in 2008 to promote literature and fine art from Alaska.

New Book :: I Wanna Be Loved By You

I Wanna Be Loved By You poetry anthology book cover image

I Wanna Be Loved By You
Poems on Marilyn Monroe
Edited by Susana H. Case and Margo Taft Stever
Milk & Cake Press, January 2022

This anthology compiles poems about Marilyn Monroe from an array of contemporary poets, among them Gwendolyn Brooks, Ted Berrigan, and Frank O’Hara, and includes a poem by Marilyn Monroe herself. The introduction by Lois Banner provides context for the life of the iconic American celebrity, while the poems gathered here demonstrate Monroe’s cultural and emotional impact. Profits from the sale of this anthology will be donated to RAINN.

Book Review :: Pocket Universe by Nancy Reddy

Pocket Universe by Nancy Reddy book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Nancy Reddy’s Pocket Universe confronts the bloody battle of birth, namely a child’s and when a “woman becomes a mother,” but there are other kinds of births, too, within obstetrics, child development, and because the word birth doubles as transition—“into the next life.” The collection opens with the 16th century practice of male doctors moving “between delivery room and morgue,” which put women’s lives at grave risk before epidemiology revealed the necessity of washing hands to prevent communicable disease. From some history of birth, birthing medicine and practices, the poems move to the “failings / of our postpartum bodies” and perinatal anxieties and realities, where the “baby teaches me / I am not what I thought.” The poems of the third section deal with hauntings: “The ghosts of all those women” who lost children in childbirth, including the poet’s grandmother, and the fears particular to a mother of sons. Women’s legitimate “catalog of grievances” continues “inside the long future” of motherhood and marriage in the book’s fourth section, where the poet wonders “if domestic has to be / the opposite of desire.” To answer herself: “inside this mother’s body / / there’s a woman in here still.” Stitched throughout the collection is the enormous responsibility placed on and the shocking disregard for women, often blamed for experiencing pain during childbirth and “perinatal mood and anxiety disorders” in the birth “history written by a man.” This is poetry that admits: “It is so hard / to live inside a body,” and yet “our collective unbearable luck” of “[t]he new world’s not / an unmixed blessing.” Ultimately, Reddy’s is a celebration of this “blessed and lucky life.”

Pocket Universe by Nancy Reddy. Louisiana State University Press, March 2022.

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

New Book :: Tower

Tower Stories by Andy Plattner book cover image

Tower: Stories
Fiction by Andy Plattner
Mercer University Press, April 2022

The characters in this collection of stories by Andy Plattner, Assistant Professor of English at Kennesaw State Universit, move through their lives with the sense that something is missing. When attempting to fill the void, they discover that the problem isn’t what’s missing, the problem invariably has to do with a truth they’ve been trying to avoid.

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New Book :: Zero Point Poiesis

Zero Points Poiesis book cover image

Zero Point Poiesis: Essays on George Quasha’s Axial Art
Edited by Burt Kimmelman
Aporeia, June 2022

Published by Aporeia, an imprint of Marsh Hawk Press, Zero Points Poiesis gathers essays by writers Vyt Bakaitis, William Benton, Edward S. Casey, Chris Funkhouser, Matt Hill, Andrew Joron, Robert Kelly, Burt Kimmelman, Kimberly Lyons, Cheryl Pallant, Tamas Panitz, Carter Ratcliff, Gary Shapiro, and Charles Stein who elucidate George Quasha’s unique achievement as poet, artist, and thinker. They’re complemented by Thomas Fink’s interview with the poet on the poetics of preverbs, an introduction by Burk Kimmelman, and forward by Jerome McGann.

Book Review :: Imago, Dei by Elizabeth Johnston Abrose

Imago Dei by Elizabeth Johnston Abrose book cover image

Guest Post by Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

With a comma that interrupts a Latin phrase etched in Christian history, Elizabeth Johnston Abrose’s Imago, Dei offers disjunction to give worn tropes new context. This deliberate juxtaposition rejuvenates the flat and stale of tradition.

A cycle of eighteen poems in free verse, the collection’s pieces each center in the third person on an unnamed female. Like the larva that becomes caterpillar that becomes chrysalis to become an adult – or imago – moth or butterfly, she is both identical with and different from her other incarnations.

Cited quotations in epigraph from both entomological and biblical literature underscore a tone of scholarly detachment and/or posture of dissociation. References to insects in the garden spin a theme of metamorphosis to encompass, which reinvigorates the classical Greek spiritual depiction of Psyche as butterfly.

Across its arc, the chapbook teases out narrative threads of youth marked by all-too-common traumas of evangelical Christianity: shamed sexuality, abuse masquerading as discipline in the guise of the father, a concomitant confusion of pain with love. For those considering such traumas from personal experience to reflect on the substance of religion’s impact on their lives, this collection, while perhaps triggering, may serve to reaffirm and validate.

Imago, Dei by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose. Rattle Poetry, February 2022.

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar is a neurodivergent writer of poems, plays and fiction who is presently disabled. Previously employed as a college prof, copy editor, bathtub repair technician, substance abuse prevention agency success coach and marketing specialist, he lives in Racine, WI with his partner and their children. Connect with him on social media and get free chapbooks at bio.fm/nicholasmichaelravnikar.

New Book :: Dancing Mockingbird

Dancing Mockingbird by Steven Dale Davison book cover image

Dancing Mockingbird
Poetry by Steven Dale Davison
Kelsay Books, February 2022

Dancing Mockingbird is one of several books coming out this year from journalist and professional writer Steven Dale Davison. The poems in this collection offer readers a meditation on the natural world and the feelings and insights they evoke. The works are grouped in sections for mountains, animals, and bodies of water under such labels as The Rail of Silence, A Vast Nest, Extra Terra, Elementals, and Speak the Lake. Interlogos – love poem interludes – are nestled between each section, and a Prologos and Epilogos complete the reader’s journey.

Book Review :: IN. by Will McPhail

IN. by Will McPhail book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

I’ll start by saying that IN. by Will McPhail is not just one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a long time; it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

The plot is simple: readers follow Nick, an illustrator, as he tries to truly connect with people. We see montages of his daily life, moving from one wonderfully-parodied coffee shop to another, and his superficial interactions with neighbors and strangers, as well as his mother and sister. His internal monologue shows his desire to have a meaningful conversation with them, but he is unable to bring himself to do so.

When he finally breaks through and has a brief, but real, conversation with a plumber repairing a toilet, he begins to find the ability to connect with more and more people. In those moments, the art dramatically changes, moving from basic black and white sketches to larger, full-color, imagistic scenes that represent the joy and responsibility he feels in those moments.

He also meets and begins dating Wren. While he becomes able to connect with more people in his life, he is unable to have an honest conversation with her. Their relationship falters because of a tragedy occurring in Nick’s life, one that ultimately enables him to find a true and meaningful connection that could last the rest of his life.

After two years of a pandemic that has separated people and forced us to find creative ways to build and sustain relationships, this graphic novel feels like exactly what we need. McPhail reminds us that our lives are too brief to spend on the surface, and we should dive deep into our relationships while we have the time.

IN. by Will McPhail. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2021.

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. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Book Review :: The Fine Art of Losing Control by Ashley Shepherd

The Fine Art of Losing Control by Ashley Shepherd book cover image

Guest Post by Diana De Jesus

In Ashley Shepherd’s The Fine Art of Losing Control, Willa Loveridge’s world is falling apart. She is failing her Foundations of Western Art class, her ex-boyfriend shares intimate photos with his friends, a roommate hates her, and her step-father and mother are occupying themselves with the upcoming arrival of their new baby. Lastly, she learns the father she never met suddenly emerges to pay for her college tuition.

To reclaim control, Willa heads to New Zealand to track down her father. However, the flight to Queenstown makes an emergency landing at Christchurch Airport. Desperate, she decides to tag along with Daphne Purcell, a YouTube sensation, she meets on the plane.

From the onset, Willa and Daphne hitchhike and get into a caravan with a cult, then escape and later hop onto another van, this time with Tosh, a popular Korean actor, and Ollie, a Scottish kid who is attached to his guitar and challenges Willa in every way.

During her journey to find her father, Willa never imagines the lessons, friendships, and romance that will develop. Gradually, she gets out of her comfort zone and discerns she cannot control everything but rather allow events to unfold naturally.

The Fine Art of Losing Control by Ashley Shepherd. Semisweet Fiction, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Diana De Jesus is an educator from Queens, NY. She is a fan of books, 80’s music to rock out to, and old television shows. Additionally, she has a blog she is still very slowly and surely updating. (dianereadsandreviews.wordpress.com)

Books Received April 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “Books” tag under “Popular Topics.”

Fiction
American Blues: A Novel, Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck, She Writes Press
How to Adjust to the Dark: A Novella, Rebecca van Laer, Long Day Press
Chances in Disguise, Diana J. Noble, Pinata Books
Vincent Ventura and the Curse of the Weeping Woman, Xavier Garza, Pinata Books
Evangelina Everyday, Dawn Burns, Cornerstone Press
Aftershock: A Novel, George H. Wolfe, Livingston Press
The High Price of Freeways, Judy Juanita, Livingston Press
Halley’s Comet, Hannes Barnard, Catalyst Press
Disruption: New Short Fiction from South Africa, Ed. Rachel Zadok, Karina Szczurek, Jason Mykl Snyman, Catalyst Press
On My Papa’s Shoulders, Niki Daly, Catalyst Press
The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap, Bridget Krone, Catalyst Press
Fly High, Lolo, Niki Daly, Catalyst Press
The History of Man, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, Catalyst Press
The Distortions, Christopher Linforth, Orison Books
Have I Said Too Much?, Carmen Delzell, Paycock Press
Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, John Weir, Red Hen Press
Seasons of Purgatory, Shahriar Mandanipour, Bellevue Literary Press

Continue reading “Books Received April 2022”

Book Review :: The Damage Done by Susana H. Case

The Damage Done by Susana Case book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In The Damage Done, Susana H. Case creates a poetic noir, “drawn from the history of the FBI in the 1960s and 1970s,” where “[a]ll kinds of things / spin out of control,” where “anything could happen.” Like all noir, the book opens with a dead body: Janey’s, a fictionalized amalgam of a Twiggy-like supermodel and a girlfriend of one of “the Panthers.” Janey’s unsolved death becomes a means for the poet to speak about the objectification of women—in life and death—as well as those implicated in the death of a woman. The woman’s death also becomes a means for the poet to speak about prejudice and corruption within the NYPD and FBI, whose detectives and agents exploit Janey’s death, using it as justification to coerce information, plant evidence, and initiate “warrantless taps.” The authorities insist that “people / don’t always know what they know.” They abuse their power with impunity: “It can be arranged that the wrong one / is fingered, a natural patsy.” This is a book about the power “of information, of disinformation”; a book about power games: “play or get out of the game.” This is a book about collateral damage to the lives of women and Black people: “(Witnesses always see a black man.) / So what if the law implicates the wrong / man, the cops argue, sooner or later / / he’d do something bad—think of picking / him up as a sort of prevention detention.” In the end, the lawman is the one who has the privilege; he “wonders whether / walking away is all you can do,” and he gets to live and to walk away. But, Susana H. Case joins the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s, whose causes are just as poignant now.

The Damage Done by Susana H. Case. Broadstone Books, February 2022.

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

Book Review :: Rationalism by Douglas Luman

Rationalism by Douglas Luman book cover image

Guest Post by Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

When a computer scientist plies the tools of his trade to critique Fascist propaganda through the vehicle of contemporary poetry, the result can be hit or miss. But Douglas Luman’s Rationalism solemnly invites its reader to collaborate in a gleeful travesty of authoritarian structures.

Luman’s slim volume comprises 31 mistranslations assembled from an archive of Fascist architectural magazines, along with an epigraph, an elucidating (if too brief) endnote on his research, and an acknowledgments page that meditates on the rise of Trumpist populism as a symptom of the same system that underwrites police brutality. The untitled pieces in the collection largely suggest a tone and structure that echoes the sonnet without its various preordained formal concerns for rhyme and measure. The beams that fall through the cracks cast shadows of narrative fragments.

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Book Review :: All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney

All the Morning Crows by Meg Kearney book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

Every poem in Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows has a bird for its title, from the exotic (“Parrot,” “Ibis,” “Ostrich”) to the local (“Oriole,” “Wren,” “Juncos”). Inspired, as Kearney notes in a preface, by Diana Wells’ 2002 book 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names, the collection is equally animated by the tension between the OED definitions of “bird” she offers at the start: not only the general term for any feathered species but also slang for “maiden, girl, a woman.”

The poems take their own flights, harrowing or defiant or tender. In “Albatross,” the speaker recalls the sailor “who approached you / on the beach, spoke to you as if you were / a woman, you in the new bikini / none of the boys back home had noticed.” She is “too flattered to flee, though / the constant surf said Leave, Leave.” “Duckling, Swan” tells the fable in the voice of the once-mocked hatchling, who later returned “aglow with my gleaming” and “blinded them all.” Part elegy, part inquiry into art’s power amidst the flux of living, “Pheasant” gives the collection its title, the bird here etched in cemetery granite, wings stretched and awaiting “a flight that never begins.” By contrast, “All morning the crows / have behaved badly,” the speaker observes, as if a parallel to the poet’s meager words in the face of loss.

By the end of the volume, a kind of narrative emerges that we may take as autobiographical. But the collection has a larger scope as well, testifying to the range of human feeling and to the resilience of the poetic voice itself.

All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney. The Word Works, April 2021.

Reviewer bio: James Scruton’s most recent chapbook is The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019).

Book Review :: Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi

Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi is a poetry collection that writes with and is an homage to Portuguese and Portuguese American writers. This poet creates the company and community she seeks, celebrating her Portuguese familial and artistic heritage. Company, community, and celebration are necessary antidotes within the world of the poems which express the unrelenting anxieties of immigrants and that contribute to the immigrant experience as it relates to family, belonging, identity, and home. If in the “old country” life is “joined to water,” in the new country, America, “secrets,” “disguise,” and “anonymity” join a life to being “trapped / inside an identity you did not imagine / you would be” and “[e]xisting in a variety / of lost stages of fitting in and awkward / strength.” These poems of lacunae, of saudade, of “being Memory alone” make every effort to belong to the present while they long for the past, “because that is what grief is, a primary feeling / that must be exposed.” Accardi’s poems, belonging to two worlds, are “a dark mixture of all [she] has lost” and gained through landscape and language.

Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi. New Meridian, October 2021.

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

Book Review :: What is Left by Carla Rachel Sameth

Guest Post by Ginger Pinholster

What is Left by Carla Rachel book cover image

Deeply personal Pandemic Moments become vivid in What is Left, Carla Rachel Sameth’s engaging poetry collection. The work marries dark humor with pathos. Beginning with the first poem, which admonishes us to “Cover mouth and nose with dirty pictures and think of Santa Claus, but younger,” Sameth captures our magical thinking in the early days of COVID-19. Her poems are rich with longing, too. She aches for mask-free closeness with her child. Because he is a young black man, she reels in horror at the brutal police killing of George Floyd, knowing that, for her son and all people of color, the “body = target.” Her descriptions of kindness also overflow with love; she writes of a friend delivering flowers as “fragrances of hope.” Richly diverse, What is Left is uniquely American: Sameth remembers her Grandma Pearl’s Yiddish songs, and she writes with feeling about her son and her wife. After months of quarantine – when, as Sameth notes, we were like housecats, “confined to our corners, dependent” – What is Left feels like a warm hug.

What is Left by Carla Rachel Sameth. dancing girl press, December 2021.

Reviewer bio: Ginger Pinholster’s debut novel, City in a Forest, received a Gold Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association in 2020. Her second novel, Snakes of St. Augustine, will be distributed by Regal House Publishing in September 2023. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the Eckerd Review, Northern Virginia Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @gingerpin or at https://www.GingerPinholster.com.

Book Review :: Resurrecting a Genre by O’Neill and Meyer

The Way Forward by Robert O'Neill and Dakota Meyer book cover image

Guest Post by Shelby Kearns

The candor and vulnerability in The Way Forward: Master Life’s Toughest Battles and Create Your Lasting Legacy by Robert O’Neill and Dakota Meyer just might resurrect the military memoir/self-help genre.

This new book by O’Neill and Meyer certainly has its predictable moments, emulating American Sniper and other made-for-Hollywood books. Part one has life lessons from O’Neill’s upbringing in Butte, Montana, and Meyer’s in Columbia, Kentucky. Part two is stories of boot camp, combat, and their post-military careers. Their Hollywood-worthy stories include O’Neill firing the shot that killed Osama bin Laden and Meyer receiving the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Ganjgal in 2009.

Continue reading “Book Review :: Resurrecting a Genre by O’Neill and Meyer”

New Book :: The High Price of Freeways

The High Price of Freeways by Judy Juanita book cover image

The High Price of Freeways
Stories by Judy Juanita
Livingston Press, July 2022

Co-Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, this collection looks at the Black experience in Oakland, California, from the founding of the Black Panthers to present day. Judy Juanita is a teacher, poet, novelist, and playwright who served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the Black Panther Party in 1968 while attending San Francisco State and joined the nation’s first Black Student Union.

4th Annual Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners Available for Pre-order

2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners banner

Driftwood Press has announced last year’s Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners are available for pre-order on their website.

Jennifer Silverman’s Bath is set to be released in May of this year. 2021 contest judge Traci Brimhall had to say this about Silverman’s collection

Jen Silverman’s poems are baptisms of desire. They’ve traveled the world and come back to tell you the pleasure to be found there, the holes of each leaving, the way it is all “drenched in light and wine.” Economical in syntax and generous in image, Bath astonishes at every turn with its heart, its wisdom, its waters.

Melody S. Gee’s The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat is set to be released in June. Brimhall said of Gee’s collection

Melody Gee’s gorgeous poems offer both divine wounds and delicious consolations. At the intersections of the familial and the sacred, The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat reminds us that what is created is also consumed. Beautiful, sensory, and aching, this collection reminds us that not all hungers are mortal ones.

Pre-order your copies today!

New Book :: Finalists

Finalists by Rae Armantrout book cover image

Finalists
Poetry by Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, February 2022

A double book (176pp) by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout. I mean, really, do we need to say more? How about some samples? From “Shush”: “A smart pop song / can convince a desperate person / to see herself / as a thrill seeker. // This is considered a job skill.” From “Flocks”: “As thoughts take pleasure / in forming, then break and / retreat.” From “Plague Year”: “What we share is distance: telephone poles / leaning this way and that, a wayward / crowd that staggers drunkenly / toward an empty, mauve horizon. // We can’t wait to see / who dies next.” This is not a book of poetry. It’s a collection of daily meditations to see us through. To what? Exactly.

New Book :: Subtexts

Subtexts by Dan Brady book cover image

Subtexts
Poetry by Dan Brady
Publishing Genius Press, February 2022

In an innovative form, Barrelhouse poetry editor Dan Brady plays with the methods of erasure poetry to create something entirely new. This collection of ten poems (in 88 pages) uncovers the networks of language and meaning through shifting layers of text. The poems focus on some of the greatest threats humans face in 2022—climate change, the surveillance state, America’s mental health crisis—and how our future hinges on our ability or failure to communicate.

New Book :: More or Less

More or Less by Susannah Q. Pratt book cover image

More or Less: Essays from a Year of No Buying
Creative Nonfiction by Susannah Q. Pratt
EastOver Press, February 2022

In 2018, Pratt and her family decided to buy nothing for a year: “We undertook a 365-day moratorium on the purchase of new clothes, toys, games, books, electronics, gear, furniture, housewares, and other things that fall in the general category of ‘stuff.’ For twelve months we purchased only essentials – food, toiletries, light bulbs, and a few pairs of shoes for my growing boys. We stayed out of stores and off of online shopping sites. We fixed things. We made things. We went without.” Winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Nonfiction, the essays in More or Less explore the degree to which we are defined, and confined, by what we own.

New Book :: Behind the Big House

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Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South
African American Studies by Jodi Skipper
University of Iowa Press, March 2022

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, all too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House is a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

New Book :: Crow Funeral

Crow Funeral by Kate Hanson Foster book cover image

Crow Funeral
Poetry by Kate Hanson Foster
EastOver Press, March 2022

Crow Funeral is the end result of intention and design gone off-script. What began as a fascination with a phenomenon of crows congregating in overwhelming numbers around one of their fallen, eventually became a collection that merges an interest in the neurological wiring of birds with a mother’s battle with postpartum depression and anxiety.

New Book :: Khabaar

Khabaar by Madhushree Ghosh book cover image

Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family
Memoir by Madhushree Ghosh
University of Iowa Press, April 2022

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what belonging looks like in a new place with foods carried over from the old country. These questions are integral to the Ghosh’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food. Includes eleven color and three b&w photos in addition to the gorgeous cover photo.

New Book :: This World is Not Your Home

This World is Not Your Own by Matthew Vollmer book cover image

This World is Not Your Home
Essays by Matthew Vollmer
EastOver Press, March 2022

Winner of the 2021 Eastover Prize for Nonfiction, This World Is Not Your Home includes essays ranging from third-person accounts to notes, instructions, and extended meditations, representing many of the possibilities available to the writer of creative nonfiction. The title essay, written in the second person, tells of Vollmer’s growing up in rural North Carolina and catalogs the psychological pressures exerted by a little-known religion. Written using a variety of forms and points of view, these essays show Vollmer’s dexterity of the form.

New Book :: The Writing of an Hour

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The Writing of an Hour
Poetry and Prose by Brenda Coultas
Wesleyan University Press, March 2022
ISBN: 9780819580702
Hardcover, 88pp; $35

In The Writing of an Hour, New York poet and teacher Brenda Coultas considers the effort and the deliberateness that brings her to her desk each day. Despite domestic and day job demands and widespread lockdown, Coultas takes the reader on a journey in four sections; from a bedroom to an improvised desk over the North Sea, where she attempts to create an artwork inside an airplane cabin flying over Greenland’s rivers of ice.

New Book :: Horse Not Zebra

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Horse Not Zebra
Poetry by Eric Nelson
Terrapin Books, April 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947896-54-3
Paperback, 94pp; $17

This newest collection of poems from writer and Georgia Southern University emeritus Eric Nelson captures the essence of everyday life through the lens of having been there, done that, and paid close attention. The title poem begins, “When med students are learning / how to diagnose symptoms, they’re told / think horse, not zebra – the common, no the exotic.” And though the subject matter may seem common by their titles, “My Alarm,” “Mulch,” “By Campfire,” and “Parade,” Nelson is able to lift these subjects up to the scrutiny of our own experiences, shared through his own, in ways that, while perhaps not exotic, resonate a sense of wholeness and completion. And there must be a story behind why bears appear repeatedly throughout.

New Book :: You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair is in Braids

You Cannot Resist Me When My Haire is in Braid book cover image

You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair is in Braids
Creative Nonfiction by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
Wayne State University Press, March 2022
ISBN: 9780814349410
Paperback, 118pp; $18.99

From their Made in Michigan Writers Series, award-winning poet, essayist, journalist, activist, scholar focused on issues of Asian America, race, justice, and the arts Frances Kai-Hwa writes about building a new life with four children after a messy divorce. These twenty-seven lyrical essays move between personal and cultural topics from bossy aunties, unreliable suitors, and an uncertain political landscape and reflect on lessons learned from both Asian American elders and young multiracial children. Black and white photographs accompany some of the essays.

The Red Canoe: A Thrilling Ride

The Red Canoe book cover image

Guest Post by Cindy Fazzi

A canoe is no speedboat, but Wayne Johnson’s The Red Canoe is a thrill of a ride. At the center of the novel are Buck, a carpenter, and fifteen-year-old Lucy. They are both Ojibwe living on the border of Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community reservation in Minnesota.

One afternoon, while Buck is building a boat in his garage, a girl in a dirty pink hoodie appears. Her name is Lucy, and she says: “I’d like to learn how to make boats.”

Continue reading “The Red Canoe: A Thrilling Ride”

New Book :: The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore

The Neverending Quest for the Other Side by Sylvie Kande book cover image

The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos
Poetry by Sylvie Kandé
Translation by Alexander Dickow
Wesleyan University Press, February 2022
ISBN: 9780819580733
Hardcover, 176pp; $35

Sylvie Kandé’s neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today’s tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé’s language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun. Presented in side by side translation into English from French.

New Book :: Girl as Birch

Girl as Birch by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson book cover image

Girl as Birch
Poetry by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson
Bauhan Publishing, April 2022
ISBN: 9780872333338
Paperback, 92pp; $17

In Girl as Birch, Gibson mimics the flexible (adaptable? too pliant? healthily, if secretly, resilient, then, finally, aligned) motion of a birch in strong wind, as it relates to the options seemingly available to her, growing up as a girl. The poems imitate in form the experiences they evoke. The leitmotifs of red, birches, mirrors, walls enclosing gardens, labyrinths as metaphors for constraint, recur throughout the book. Without being a manifesto, Girl as Birch explores female gender roles with both pliant and uprising imagery and action. Restriction and rebellion, silence and speech, appearance and artifice, passion and repression, the past and being present, buffet and embolden the speaker of these poems. The elastic and varied syntax, pace, music, and the use of rhetoric and wit express deft self-examination. The book moves from serial impressionistic poems of early childhood to discrete lyric poems of memory and experience and on to a sense of emotional, social, spiritual evolution, not resolution.

New Book :: All Rise

All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa 1910-1948
Graphic History by Richard Conyngham
Catalyst Press, April 2022
ISBN: 9781946395634
Paperback, 248pp; $24.95

This collective work revives six true stories of resistance by marginalized South Africans against the country’s colonial government in the years leading up to Apartheid. In six parts—each of which is illustrated by a different South African artist—All Rise shares the long-forgotten struggles of ordinary, working-class women and men who defended the disempowered during a tumultuous period in South African history. From immigrants and miners to tram workers and washerwomen, the everyday people in these stories bore the brunt of oppression and in some cases risked their lives to bring about positive change for future generations. With artwork by Saaid Rahbeeni, The Trantraal Brothers, Liz Clarke, Dada Khanyisa, Tumi Mamabolo, and Mark Modimola.

New Book :: Imago, Dei

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Imago, Dei
Poetry by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose
Rattle, February 2022
ISBN: 978-1-931307-50-5
Chapbook, 44pp; $6
Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

How does a daughter emerge whole from an upbringing saturated with religious fundamentalism? And if not whole, how does she piece together some kind of coherent self out of fragmented half-truths? The eighteen narrative poems in Imago, Dei bear witness to the emotional and psychological weight amassed from a girlhood fraught with vexed messages about what it means to be “good.” Narrated in third-person, lyric vignettes, these are poems about a daughter’s desire to be the son her well-meaning, but deeply damaged father thinks he needs; about an adolescent world filled with cute boys, predatory church leaders, Lakes of Fire, and broken girls who beg to be reborn; about the bad-girl specters of Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah that haunt her into adulthood and wreak havoc on her intimate relationships; about dirty dancing, Bible study, Lacanian theory, and crying after sex; and about what happens when a recovering evangelical becomes a mother to her own daughters.

New Book :: Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough

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Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough
Poetry by Kyle Tran Myhre
Featuring Art by Casper Pham
Button Poetry, March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63834-009-6
Paperback, 188pp; $18 / Signed $25

Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough is a sci-fi-flavored exploration of the role that art and artists play in resisting authoritarianism. Featuring new poems, theater elements, and Casper Pham‘s stunning visual art, the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe ode to Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it’s also a one-of-a-kind practitioners’ take on poetry, power, and possibility.

New Book :: Halley’s Comet

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Halley’s Comet
Young Adult Fiction by Hannes Barnard
Catalyst Press, January 2022
ISBN: 9781946395559
Paperback, 320pp; $16.99

Halley’s Comet is the coming-of-age story of Pete de Lange, a white 16-year-old schoolboy, set in small-town South Africa in 1986. Pete lives a relatively sheltered life, primarily concerned with girls and rugby—until one January night changes everything. Thrust together with two complete strangers—Petrus, a black farmworker’s son, and Sarita, an Indian shopkeeper’s daughter—the trio find themselves running for their lives from the vicious Rudie, whose actions will ripple far beyond that fateful night. This era-defying friendship—sparked by a shared secret— challenges everything Pete thought he knew and believed. And when anti-Apartheid revolutionaries set their sights on the town, it will change the course of the three young people’s lives forever. Halley’s Comet is a story of friendship, love, change, taking chances, hope, a comet, and some pretty cool 80s music.

New Book :: The Loneliest Girl

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The Loneliest Girl
Poetry by Kate Gale
University of New Mexico Press, February 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6369-5
Paperback, 88pp; $18.95

Who was more alone than Medusa? Raped in Athena’s temple, transformed into a monster, and banished into a cave, Medusa may be the ultimate example of victim blaming. In The Loneliest Girl, Kate Gale creates a powerful alternative narrative for Medusa and for all women who have carried guilt and shame—for being a woman, for not being enough, for being a victim. She offers a narrative in which women are the makers of the world—in which women find their way out from the cave of the Cisthene and into a world where they determine their own destiny.

New Book :: Disruption

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Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
Edited by Rachel Zadok, Karina Szczurek, Jason Mykl Snyman
Catalyst Press, September 2021
ISBN: 9781946395573
Paperback, 260pp; $16.95

This genre-spanning anthology explores the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. In these evocative, often prescient, stories, new and emerging writers from across Africa investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more. Facing our shared anxieties head on, these authors scrutinize assumptions and invent worlds that combine the fantastical with the probable, the colonial with the dystopian, and the intrepid with the powerless, in stories recognizing our collective future and our disparate present. Disruption is the newest anthology from Short Story Day Africa, a non-profit organization established to develop and share the diversity of Africa’s voices through publishing and writing workshops.

New Book :: And If the Woods Carry You

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And If the Woods Carry You
Poetry by Erin Rodoni
Southern Humanities Review Press, December 2021
ISBN: 978-1-930508-51-4
Paperback, 80pp; $16.95

Winner of the 2020 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, And If the Woods Carry You takes readers on a journey to the brink of climate catastrophe; a mother grappling with her choice to bring children into an apocalyptic world sends her daughters into the woods of fairy tale as a rite of initiation. The woods carry her fears of extinction— devastating fires, rising seas, and the predatory dangers of girlhood—but also contain the transformative magic of love, interdependence, and renewal. And If the Woods Carry You roots into the wild heart of motherhood, where worry and wonder intertwine.