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Book Review :: Writer in a Life Vest by Iris Graville

Writer in a Life Vest by Irish Graville book cover image

Guest Post by Deborah Nedelman

Iris Graville, author of the award-winning memoir Hiking Naked, lives on an island in the Salish Sea and writes as a citizen of the planet. Writer in a Life Vest as a collection of essays is a journey of discovery and an education about a delicate ecosystem which supports some of the world’s most iconic creatures. The first Writer in Residence on the Washington State Ferries, Iris spent a year riding the interisland ferry through the San Juan Islands of the Salish Sea. Readers cycle with her as the ferry glides and rocks through the home of the endangered resident orcas (killer whales) and meet scientific experts who are devoting their knowledge and energies to saving these rare creatures. As we learn about riding this ferry — including witnessing a moveable ukulele jam, where players board the ferry at various ports, play together for a while and move on — Graville teaches us about the current state of the sea’s health and our connection to it. The multiple essay forms Graville employs keep readers off-kilter, as if standing on the deck of a rocking ship, yet they invite us to hang on and to look deeper. Like Graville, I live on an island in the Salish Sea, though not in the San Juans, and I swim in the sea year-round. It is my concern for the fragile state of this body of water, of the resident orcas, and of our planet that has led me to write this review. Graville’s collection belongs in the genre of books alerting us to the precarious state of our planet, but it stands out by pointing our gaze toward hopefulness and action.

Writer in a Life Vest by Iris Graville. Homebound Publications, March 2022.

Reviewer Bio: Deborah Nedelman, PhD, MFA is co-author of two non-fiction books: A Guide for Beginning Psychotherapists (Cambridge Press) and Still Sexy After All These Years (Perigee/Penguin). Her novel, What We Take for Truth (Adelaide Press, 2019) won the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. Deborah is a manuscript coach and leads writing and watercolor painting workshops.

Book Review :: Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul book cover image

Guest Post by MG Noles

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Someone with whom you could confide anything? A soulmate who loved you no matter what you said or did? Celia Paul’s extraordinary new book, Letters to Gwen John, adopts Gwen as just such an “imaginary” friend/soulmate and listener as she writes all her thoughts and feelings to the long-dead post-impressionist painter who lived in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. Using a series of letters, Paul reveals her inner thoughts about life, art, men, freedom, and beauty. The book is part memoir and part art history, and it makes a beautiful read. Filled with imagination and insight, Paul examines the meaning of art and life. She shares her vision and makes you believe that communication is possible across space and time. As she puts it, “time is a strange substance.” And somehow, as you read this amazing book, you see Gwen John seated in a cozy room somewhere, like the one she paints in Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, reading Celia Paul’s letters with a faint smile.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. New York Review Books, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: MG Noles is a sometime essayist, reviewer, history buff.

Book Review :: Spit by Daniel Lassell

Spit poetry by Daniel Lassell book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes

Daniel Lassell’s Spit harnesses the power of language to contemplate whether to embrace one’s own roots or to cast them off in favor of creating a new identity for a new life, and as such influences our sense of belonging. This conflict is one that Lassell grapples with for many years of his life, blending these two identities of past and future together to become “a city boy inside / the body of a country.” Part one recounts “sopping, hazy Kentucky” and when “a chicken costs 35 cents.” The natural world reigns supreme in this setting. The old barn on the land which “season by season… / have held their angle, onto the metal gate / leaned against a post pile for storage, / some form of pillar” soon gives way as “the field outside waits, / watching the barn’s leaning face / disappear” and nature has won against that which man has made. Yet the supremacy of nature does not last for long, nor does Lassell’s life in the country. The second and third parts make the progressive transition from “a hundred acres / into one” and by the final section, Lassell has completely immersed himself in the “concrete slabs” and “crumbling sidewalk squares” of the city. Yet his years on the farm never leave Lassell, for even in the city he recalls “hoisting bales up to a hay wagon” and “not waking during night / to car lights, sirens, hunger” and how, despite having “climbed from being / of dirt, rough fingernails,” his past will always be with him, no matter the distance or passage of time. Lassell’s poignant yet heart-warming story about what defines “home” presents a new meaning to the influence of upbringing and how sometimes home is not a physical place we return to but the memories we cherish that help guide us into the uncertainty of adulthood.

Spit by Daniel Lassell. Michigan State University Press, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her. 

Magazine Review :: “The Memory of Clay” by Bruce Ballenger

The Sun May 2022 literary magazine cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The May 2022 issue of The Sun is loosely tied together by a focus on food or nourishment, so Bruce Ballenger’s essay, “The Memory of Clay,” initially looks like an outlier, as he focuses on his relationship with his father. He uses the metaphor of clay to guide his essay, as Ballenger’s daughter Julia explains why she works with clay, despite its unwillingness to easily follow the form she sets for it. Ballenger struggles to shape his memories of his father, an alcoholic journalist who was abusive toward their family, into something that helps him understand his father. Ballenger works to mold the story he tells about his father, ranging from the narrative of the wronged son to learning why his father never published the book he had a contract for. The essay ends largely unresolved, as Ballenger isn’t sure what to do with the complicated memories he has, but he returns to something else his daughter has taught him about clay. There are times when it resists taking any shape at all, and so there is nothing to do with it but start again. Ballenger leaves the reader and himself there, knowing that that is what we all have to do.

“The Memory of Clay” by Bruce Bellenger. The Sun, May 2022.

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

Book Review :: Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas

Bloodwarm poetry by Taylor Byas book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes 

Taylor Byas’s poetry collection Bloodwarm is an inspiring and modern commentary on what it means to be a Black woman living in a society where “I’m/seen as a threat” simply because of the color of her skin and sheds new light on the strong presence of racism within a variety of situations. The book opens with the inundation of Tweets surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, capturing “rubber bullets / pinging a reporter and her crew as they run for cover” and “a police car plowing into a peaceful crowd” all while “white friends” will promise to “do better” before they “bullet into our inboxes and ask us to hand them the answers” about what they should do or say. From there, Byas examines other aspects of racism and the lack of representation of the Black community in the media by putting into perspective the archetype of the damsel in distress of a superhero film. Byas describes how the women who “look like Kirsten Dunst or Emma Stone” are “dainty enough to be rescued by a white hero” and any type of confrontation between the speaker and a white woman would lead to “there is an African-American woman threatening me” and “call the police.” Byas does not shy away from reflecting the struggles that the Black community faces, and what it means to “have to stand / between / invisible” simply to avoid unjust persecution based on skin color. Yet peace in the racial conflict is difficult to achieve because “this is / the standard / this denial / the / rebellion against / negotiations”. Byas does not shirk from the ugly truth of the impact racism has had on the Black community, and her openness in discussing these topics allows for the possibility to have more honest and fruitful conversations about how to create lasting and truly impactful change in society.

Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas. Variant Literature, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her.

Book Review :: The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson

The Ache and the Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, the poet wonders “just what I can seize” while a “homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name / fills up every night.” Welcome to the rodeo of life: a “father plays evangelical AM in the garden… to keep the deer away,” a friend pours gasoline on a “noisy cricket… outside her window” and “the baby arrives but he is dead already.” Humans and animals are “desperate / for life” in towns named “Why” where “none of my questions / were answered: Why / did our son (apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, / four days shy / of due) / have to die?” Wilkinson’s poems explore “hidden bonds” and how not to lose one’s mind when the world is burning. These are poems with “the end of the world” in them. With “much sad truth to say” about “bodies that break, that bear each other, / that hold one another in dark places.” [Readers can download this e-book for free from the publisher’s website link below.]

The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson. Sundress Publications, 2021.

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

Book Review :: April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab

April at the Ruins poetry by Lawrence Raab book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

Depending on the reader, the title of Lawrence Raab’s tenth poetry collection, April at the Ruins, might evoke “the cruelest month” of Eliot’s The Waste Land or a postcard from a Henry James character on The Grand Tour. There are glimmers of each here — mixtures of memory and desire as well as travels both real and metaphorical. But more often we find Raab meditating on love and loss (and much besides) with his characteristic sense of gratitude, entire lives suggested by a precise detail or turn of phrase:

… and as they crossed
the street she took his hand,
just as if everything
they hadn’t told each other
had never happened.
(“One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other”)

In “Little Ritual,” stones collected and then forgotten beside a lake become metaphysical emblems, the “zigzags of blue” in a “shiver of quartz” reminding the speaker “that some day everything / I love must be set aside, / or given away, or lost.” Amid the ruin we’ve made or witnessed of this world, Raab nonetheless celebrates an April of the spirit. “Nothing is beyond repair,” he writes. “How can there be a beautiful ending / without many beautiful mistakes?”

April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, 2022.

Reviewre bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019). He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, among other honors.

Book Review :: On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard is a collection of poems “not elegiac” but of “another kind of seeing that involves letting go.” That requires “a dream we hold to,” where “orange and quick” fish are held as “dear / … as headstones,” and a guiding question is: “How to love in the midst of tumult?” These poems are too humble and intelligent to answer conclusively. But slant. From a squad car that runs over a squirrel to a child whacked for dropping ice cream, these poems acknowledge the range of “advent, accident, / celebration” in our lives together where either “we take up arms” — “The war / Is a war we all fight, and is near” — or we open our arms to “our / Life together / Quiet / Aimless / And full.” There is love in these poems. Love of life and others. And, love of language: a “ricocheting” “hallelujah” “Heaven” of sound and meaning unabashedly riots throughout — “What care for shame? In any of this?” Lovingly the poems share with the tender reader “the holy / Moment this moment.” Reading this book, “To be sitting / Here, the two of us”: “It felt good. And sad, of course. But mostly just good.”

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard. Barrow Street Press, 2021.

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

Book Review :: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel, How High We Go in the Dark, doesn’t have a plot per se, as it reads more like an interconnected collection of short stories than it does a novel. A character’s wife from one chapter will show up in a later chapter as a friend to the girlfriend of another character, a minor characters in one chapter becomes the focus of a later chapter or vice versa. What the characters do have in common is a tenuous existence, as Earth has become less and less habitable. Throughout much of the book, a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people by mutating their organ cells, causing hearts to behave like livers or brains to change into lungs. Even after that tragedy becomes more controllable, there is still environmental disaster, as wildfires rage constantly, the Arctic is quickly melting, and sea levels rise by feet, not by inches. What Nagamatsu is most interested in exploring, however, is how people avoid one another, even in the midst of suffering, and how they might still be able to connect to one another. Though technology — perhaps even space travel — could save people’s lives, only true connection has a chance of healing their souls.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. William Morrow, 2022,

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

Book Review :: You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

New York Times journalist Kate Murphy explores the many facets of listening: the physical, mental, and, most importantly, emotional. As her title implies, she points out the ways people have stopped listening to one another and the effects of that lack in our lives. She uses neuroscience to talk about how we sync with one another when we truly listen, as well as what we can learn from improvisational comedy about how to fully engage in a conversation. Murphy explores the loneliness that has crept into our lives due to a lack of feeling heard. That deficit can come from the assumptions one makes, the technology that distracts us, or the difference in how quickly our mind thinks of what to say and how slowly it processes what we hear. Thankfully, she also explores ways we don’t listen to ourselves, choosing the negative voices that override what we most need to hear, as well as times when we should stop listening to others who wish us nothing good. As we move into more face-to-face contact after the past two years, Murphy reminds us we should all work to be better listeners, so all of our lives will be richer.

You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy. Celadon Books, 2020.

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 @kevinbrownwrite or  http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Book Review :: The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Dawnie Walton’s debut novel is a book by the main character Sunny Curtis, the first African-American female editor of a mythical, music magazine. Sunny seeks to discover the details surrounding the death of her father, who was killed at the final concert of Opal and Nev, a fictional duo from the early 1970s. Everybody knows what happened to him, but nobody knows exactly how and why he died in a riot near the end of that performance. Making matters more complicated, Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father. The book is a series of interviews with those surrounding the event, plus Sunny’s editor’s notes.

Walton uses this setup to raise questions about privilege surrounding race and gender. While Nev, a White British man, goes on to have a successful career after the event, Opal, a Black woman, never has a chance to do so. Others define Opal in ways that limit her, even while she tries to challenge a variety of establishments. Nev plays music that makes people comfortable, so he succeeds. Opal’s struggles are mirrored in Sunny’s work and the events that surround one final revival show for Opal and Nev, revealing that not much has changed in fifty years.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton. 37 Ink, March 2022.

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

Book Review :: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Emily St. John Mandel takes the reader through locations that range from the woods of British Columbia to colonies on the moon and through times that move from 1912 to 2401. Her story follows several characters: Edwin, the youngest child in a British family who will inherit almost nothing and who is exiled to Canada after he questions England’s role in India; Gaspery Roberts, a hotel detective who takes on a case with implications he could never imagine; and Olive Llewellyn, a novelist on a book tour for her work about a pandemic in a world where such tragedies happen more and more frequently. Mandel draws on her experience for the last character, as readers and critics have seen her Station Eleven as prescient in its portrayal of a much worse pandemic than our current one. She draws on questions and comments from her book tours for some of the more humorous parts of the novel. Overall, however, she’s interested in larger questions of time and reality, even exploring whether or not the characters’ world — and, thus, our own — is nothing more than a simulation. If so, though, she seems to say that doesn’t make it any less meaningful.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Alfred A. Knopf, April 2022.

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

Book Review :: Walking with Aletheia: A Survivor’s Memoir by Jean Hargadon Wehner

Walking with Aletheia A Survivor's Memoir by Jean Hargadon Wehner book cover image

Guest Post by Bruce Mason

Netflix’s The Keepers – which was released five years ago in 2017 — follows the investigation into the 1969 death of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Baltimore nun and former Archbishop Keough High School teacher, by a group of investigators including her former students. Her murder remains, to this day, unsolved, but members of her community believe she was killed to cover up Keough’s allegedly rampant clergy sex abuse, which was brought to light in the ’90s. One abuse victim previously known as “Jane Doe” is at the center of it all. “Doe” has since come forward publicly, leading many to wonder: What is Jean Hargadon Wehner doing now?

Continue reading “Book Review :: Walking with Aletheia: A Survivor’s Memoir by Jean Hargadon Wehner”

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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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”

The Everyday Life of Cyclops

Guest Post by Kevin Brown.

Cyclopedia Exotica, the latest graphic novel by Aminder Dhaliwal, begins as a series of encyclopedia entries explaining how cyclops (or cyclopes, spelled both ways throughout the work) and Two-Eyes have interacted over time. Dhaliwal imagines a world where cyclops not only exist, but their history has combined with those of the Two-Eyes, referencing mythological works, but planting this relationship directly in the contemporary world.

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Flying High with John Gillespie Magee

Guest Post by Laura Bridge.

“High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee (1941) is a special poem that I discovered at just the right moment. It was March 2020. In the UK, schools were preparing to close due to Covid-19. I was supposed to be teaching my class of eleven-year-olds about the Second World War, but the children were anxious and restless; I did not want to add to their worries. In a frantic panic to find something uplifting but still on topic, I came across Magee’s sonnet. It was the perfect combination of energy and hope. 

Continue reading “Flying High with John Gillespie Magee”

Stories to Savor

Guest Post by Alexandra Grabbe.

Many of the stories in Cara Blue Adams’s debut short story collection appeared in prestigious literary magazines. Readers follow a protagonist named Kate through her early twenties. She attends a New Year’s Eve party with postgrads in Cambridge, MA, socializes with a pushy former roommate, moves west to pursue a job opportunity, muses over the decision to discontinue a relationship with a married man, spends three days at the beach with her mom and sister. Nothing very monumental or out of the ordinary and yet the prose captivates, earning Adams both the John Simmons Award for Short Fiction and an Editor’s Choice pick from the New York Times.

Kate Bishop becomes Everywoman. She experiences heartbreak and joy and the everyday ennui that many readers will recognize from the same period of their lives. The collection begins with a gem in which Adams personifies loss, introducing a recurring theme. Read these stories slowly and savor them like fine wine.  

You Never Get it Back by Cara Blue Adams. University of Iowa Press, 2021.

Reviewer bio: Alexandra Grabbe has worked as an innkeeper, a lyricist, and a relocation consultant in Paris. For her most recent essays and stories, visit Alexandragrabbe.com.

Take a Journey with The Birdseed

Guest Post by Emma Foster.

Literary journal The Birdseed knows where the best of flash comes from: the sky and sea, the beginning and end of things. In its third issue of volume one, The Birdseed’s flash pieces appear from those mysterious depths in succinct one hundred and fifty words or less each time.

The issue’s five themes, Space, Sea, Myth, Magic, and Death, all examine the unknown, the enigmatic corners of ourselves. Whether ominous with dark exploration like Katie Holloway’s “Reaching for Nana,” or composed of poignant emotion like Lou Faber’s “On the Shelf,” each flash piece leaves the reader with a little something afterwards. The emotional resonance of each either packs a punch or leaves reader’s hearts full, creating beauty and calm among the issue’s heavy, potentially heartbreaking themes.

As someone who loves and writes flash and microfiction, being dropped into a descriptive setting or a complex mind for a few moments never fails to surprise and challenge. The Birdseed’s journey into the places we dare to tread turns up satisfying results.

The Birdseed, December 2021.

Emma Foster’s fiction and poetry has appeared in The Aurora Journal, The Drabble, Sledgehammer Lit, and others. Links: https://fosteryourwriting.com/

A New Novel of a Tempestuous Time

Guest Post by Rick Winston.

David, the protagonist of Dan Chodorkoff’s insightful new novel Sugaring Down, is conflicted. He moved to Vermont in 1969 to be part of an activist political collective, but finds himself drawn to the quiet rhythms of the Vermont seasons. The more radicalized his comrades (and especially his girlfriend Jill) become, the more David finds true fulfillment in putting down roots.

David and friends come to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with very little practical knowledge. Through his closest neighbors, the vividly realized Leland and Mary Smith, he gradually acquires the skills to survive. He must use them all when the collective disintegrates and he faces a winter alone.

Leland and Mary do not pass judgment on the newcomers and become a guide to much more than splitting wood and boiling syrup. They advise David and friends on what not to say to hostile individuals in town, how to behave at Town Meeting, and in general how to act so that— eventually—they might be accepted in their community.

Through Leland and Mary, we also learn some Vermont history that predates the counterculture. David has never heard about Barre’s radical history (Mary, the daughter of a granite worker, has Italian roots), or the forced sterilizations of Abenaki people during the eugenics movement, or the bulk tanks that forced Leland and Mary to give up dairy farming.

Chodorkoff is especially evocative as the reader sees each successive season—their glories and their challenges—through David’s city-bred eyes. And it was painful to this veteran of the late 1960s to relive the heated political conversations of the time. The book takes place at a time when some on the “New Left” were turning to violence, and Chodorkoff does not shy away from these upsetting themes.

Chodorkoff uses the maple sugaring process as a central metaphor, hence the title. The sap boils off (and there is furious boiling indeed) and we—and David—are left with the essence. Sugaring Down is a worthy addition to the growing literature about Vermont during this tempestuous time.

Sugaring Down by Dan Chodorkoff. Fomite Press, February 2022.

Reviewer bio: Rick Winston lives in Montpelier, Vermont and is the author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960.

‘The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois’

Guest Post by Kevin Brown.

In her first novel, Jeffers covers a wide range of history, but focuses on one place called Chicasetta, moving from the Indigenous Creek to African Americans and whites as they move into or are brought into the area. The novel follows two strands of a story that ultimately intersect: one from the Native American viewpoint covering hundreds of years and one following Ailey Garfield from her childhood to graduate school in history in the early 2000s.

There are echoes of African American history and literature, ranging from the obvious references to DuBois—not only the title, but significant ideas in the novel—but also narratives by those who were enslaved (Jacobs and Douglass) and more contemporary writers, such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. While drawing on such sources, though, Jeffers makes this story her own by setting it so concretely in one place and following one family’s history.

My one criticism is that the novel covers so much time, even within the contemporary story, minor characters seem to come in to serve a particular role, then exit quickly. That’s especially true when Ailey is in college and graduate school, as those characters seem to represent some idea that needed covering.

However, Jeffers uses the historical sweep to explore questions of America and identity and race, knowing there are no answers, only questions, as Ailey says at the end of the novel: “I know the story will be over soon. That I will wake up with a question. And then another, but the question is what I have wanted. The question is the point. The question is my breath.” Jeffers’s novel shows us the power of questions: Who’s asking them? Who’s avoiding them? What’s left out?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Harper, August 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/.

A Tender New Year’s Resolution

Guest Post by Annie Eacy.

It’s New Year’s Eve as I write this, and I’m isolating in my childhood bedroom after testing positive for Covid-19 after nearly two years of masking, vaccinating, boosting, testing, and more. My whole body aches and all I would like to do is spiral in self pity. Instead, I pick up a green book on my bedside table: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

Small town Ireland in the 1980s. A blue-collar man, reserved and hardworking, is married with five young daughters. He lives a measured and somewhat mundane life, not prone to much contemplation or self-reflection. That is, until one day not long before Christmas, he makes a discovery requiring an act of heroism that has the potential to change many lives and not all for the better.

This is a marvelous, unassuming novel filled with small, tender moments: helping his girls with the spelling in their Santa letters, filling hot water bottles for their beds, watching them sing in their church choir. “Aren’t we the lucky ones?” he says to his wife one night, and she agrees. However, his gratefulness is warped by the misfortune of others. How should they have so much and not share it? Keegan’s novel begs many questions about heroism and altruism, but the most compelling might be that while there can certainly be tenderness in heroism, can there also be heroism in tenderness?

I close the book, no longer wallowing in my self-pity. My mother knocks to offer me tea—her voice soothes, like honey for my sore throat. I hear her soft slippers on the stairs, the tapping of dog paws following, the click of the gas stove. Small, tender things. How much there is to be grateful for when you look or listen for it, and after reading Keegan’s novel, that’s what I’ll do.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic, November 2021.

Reviewer bio: Annie Eacy is a writer living in the Finger Lakes. She writes poetry, fiction, and essays, and is currently working on a novel.

Buckle Your Seatbelts, You’re in for Quite a Ride!

Guest Post by Cindy Dale.

Air France 006, Paris to New York. The seatbelt sign comes on. The captain calmly announces, prepare for a little turbulence.  More than a little it turns out. If you’ve ever been on a flight where you questioned if the plane would successfully land, you know the feeling. I don’t profess to have completely unraveled (or made sense of) all the threads of this book, but I enjoyed the ride.  Part sci-fi, part political thriller, part philosophical treatise, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier was a huge bestseller in France and won the Prix Goncourt.

It took a bit for the puzzle pieces to fall in place for me, but once the catalyst for these disparate stories was revealed the novel picked up speed. Apparently, the same flight with the same crew and the same passengers landed twice—four months apart.  Ultimately, we follow the fates of eleven passengers (and their clones)—from a contract killer to a film editor to the author of a novel called, you guessed it, The Anomaly. There are references to everything from Martin Guerre to Elton John to Nietzsche. Quotes from War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet, and Ecclesiastes. Sandwiched in there is the American government’s ham-fisted response to the mysterious second landing.

I confess to getting a little lost in some of the mathematical and astrophysics tangents, but the reader is drawn into the personal stories of the passengers (and their clones).  What would you say if confronted with an exact doppelgänger of you, right down to the same memories, the same secrets, the same neurosis? Definitely existential, but also humorous and with quite a few quotable lines. You may not be able to board a flight and go on an exotic adventure these days because of Covid, but you can take off on a wild ride from the comfort of home with The Anomaly.

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. Other Press, November 2021.

Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.

Expect the Unexpected

Guest Post by Julia Wilson.

Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favorite authors, primarily for her graceful blending of mundane realities with imaginative and unusual details, thus painting seemingly humdrum lives sparkling with the unexpected.

Bowlaway is no exception. Ostensibly a story about generations of an extended family living in a small town, McCracken’s odd characters are mixes of humorous, pathetic, lonely, yearning, creative, frail, damaged, liberated, secretive, selfish, and loving. They are mysterious and perplexing, not necessarily likeable but compelling. The book starts with a woman, Bertha Truitt, being found unconscious in a cemetery, without explanation. Thus begins the family saga of the Truitts, who own a bowling alley in the northeastern town of Salford.

But the real story in Bowlaway is the complexities of relationships, primarily marriages. In McCracken’s smooth sentences and use of an omniscient narrator, the reader is witness to weaknesses, loyalty, secrets, misunderstandings, and resignation. The partners in these relationships don’t have much eagerness in looking forward to the future yet have found a reality they can tolerate, containing both joy and heartache. There is tenderness between a woman and her mother-in-law, compassion of a wife in the face of her husband’s alcoholism, a recluse’s love for a mourning mother, and the relief of the few who escape the dreary life in Salford.

McCracken is at her best painting the facets of her characters so they come alive to the reader. They are flawed, self-interested, confused, and searching—as are we all.

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Ecco, November 2019.

Reviewer bio: Julia Wilson is an MA in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University

A Darned Good Book About Vermont Humor

Guest Post by Alec W. Hastings.

Bill Mares and Don Hooper put out a darned good book about Vermont humor. It’s called I Could Hardly Keep from Laughing. Even though I’ve grown up in Vermont—well, almost—I’ve always wondered what that is. Vermont humor, I mean. How would I know it if I met it walking down the street? I read eagerly and kept my eyes open for the answer.

The authors collected Vermont jokes and anecdotes by the truckload. I delighted in Hooper’s cartoon art, the bug-eyed but endearing folk of our Vermont hills. I could hardly keep from smiling at the humor of familiar Vermonters like Silent Cal, Francis Colburn, George Woodard, Al Boright, Fred Tuttle, and Rusty DeWees. Some of the Vermont humorists I met in these pages were new to me, and it tickled me to get acquainted with Robert C. Davis, David K. Smith, or Josie Leavitt.

Did Mares and Hooper entertain me and add to my understanding of Vermont humor? St. Peter on a pogo stick! You bet they did! Did they define Vermont humor like Webster? They’ve lived in Vermont long enough to know better. They did give a few hints to help us put classic Vermont humor up a tree. What did they say in chapter one? “Dry, wry, understated.” And when they unloaded their truck, the humor that tumbled out fizzed with playful wit, but I agree with Danziger. He says in the foreword it’s easier to tell what Vermont humor is than what it is not. In my mind’s eye there is always a hint of mischief in the eye of the Vermont humorist looking back at me. It bespeaks an urge to tease but never to be unkind.

For me, the best Vermont humorists have always put themselves in the same boat with their audience. Theirs is not so much the idea that “the joke is on you,” as it is that “the joke is on all of us.” But what do I know? As the fella said in chapter three, “Not a damn thing.” Vermont humor remains something of a mystery to me. Maybe that’s good. A butterfly pinned to a board is nowhere near as pretty as one fluttering by on the breeze.

I Could Hardly Keep from Laughing by Don Hooper & Bill Mares. Rootstock Publishing, December 2021.

Reviewer bio: Alec W. Hastings is the author of Cap Pistols, Cardboard Sleds & Seven Rusty Nails: A Vermont Boyhood in Happy Valley. He grew up in the hill country of Vermont when Jersey cows still grazed the pastures and men in denim boiled sap in wood-fired evaporators.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Try Your Hand at a Glosa with Page & Pappadà

Guest Post by Elda Pappadà.

I discovered P.K. Page about two years ago, and since then this talented, prolific writer has become one of my favorite poets. I was determined to read all her poetry books when I came across: Coal and Roses: Twenty-One Glosas. Glosa (Glose) is a Spanish form of poetry where the author quotes a quatrain from an existing poet and writes four ten-line stanzas with the four lines acting as a refrain in the final line of each stanza. Therefore, the first line from the quatrain would be the final line in the first stanza, and etc.  The last word at the end of the sixth and ninth lines must also rhyme with the last word in the borrowed tenth line.

Coal & Roses was a captivating find. P. K. Page manages to keep the flow continuous and writes with such ease, originality, and skill. It is very interesting to see the final product. A Glosa can keep the same tone as the original quatrain or can take a whole new path and narrative. I tried my own hand at writing a Glosa and found it to be rather liberating with unlimited possibilities. The final product was unlike most poetry I have ever written.

Coal and Roses: Twenty-One Glosas by P. K. Page. The Porcupine’s Quill, 2009.

Reviewer bio: Elda Pappadà has self-published her first poetry book, Freedom – about love, loss, and understanding. Freedom is about finding meaning in the highs and lows of everyday life, to learn and even re-learn what we need to move forward.  It’s about defining life and giving weight to everything we do.

A Realistic Portrayal of Recovery

Guest Post by Lailey Robbins.

Good Enough, written by Jen Petro-Roy, is a piece of fiction that sits comfortably between middle reader and young adult. It is quite a realistic piece of fiction with a profoundly honest and vulnerable look into the life of Riley, who is hospitalized for her struggles with anorexia nervosa. Through the story, we see her heal, stumble, and navigate through a realistically and maturely portrayed journey of recovery.

This work is nothing short of phenomenal. With its accessible language and mature-yet-realistic handling of the sensitive topics that it delves into, it is a must have. Petro-Roy, being a survivor of an eating disorder herself, offers sensitive and helpful insight into the life of recovery and the many struggles that come with it. This, alongside her brilliant character development and the portrayal of relationships within the work, home in on her wonderful style. Not only does the audience watch Riley change, grow, and heal, they are also able to watch her juggle both the friendships that she has made within the facility while simultaneously trying to keep her pre-hospitalization friendships alive.

However, the downfall of this novel lies within its conclusion. The ending is unsatisfying, for lack of better words, as there is no definite answer for what comes next. As the novel draws nearer to Riley’s release from the facility, the book ends, leaving the reader with a sense of confusion as the character that they had been expecting to see make a full recovery is still struggling. Though it is realistic to not know what comes next, especially when in recovery, the ending of this novel seems to disregard its stakes entirely, leaving the reader completely lost.

However, if you are one for open endings, this novel has many redeeming qualities that allow it to be a wonderful read.

Good Enough by Jen Petro-Roy. Feiwel & Friends, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lailey Robbins is a creative writing student from Salem College, North Carolina. Currently, she is working on a short story and a novel, with hopes to be published in the future.

Shadow & Light in Samuel Martin’s Newest Novel

Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise.

Samuel Thomas Martin, author of This Ramshackle Tabernacle and A Blessed Snarl, has produced a third work of high-caliber fiction: When the Dead are Razed, published by Slant Books. With the mesmerizing setting of urban Newfoundland as its backdrop, the novel follows the perilous adventures of Teffy Byrne, a woman determined not to raze the dead, but rather to seek justice on their behalf.

Long-interred mendacities, deeply troubled faith, and the constant threat of catastrophe keep the strings tight and ringing throughout the entire narrative as Teffy strives to solve the mystery of a young woman’s murder. There is both shadow and light in these characters and in the novel itself, with moments like these speaking to us from someplace raw and real and painfully recognizable:  “She hears a creak and spins, searches the tear-smudged room, but there’s no one there. Not a soul. Only her. Her and the goddamn wind. ‘And you!’ she turns on Christ. ‘Why is it that we ask and ask and ask and you do nothing? You do nothing! Not for me or Fin or Ger. Not for any of us! Who are you!?’ she screams. ‘Who are you to shuck off being God!'”

Martin’s novel is a wild ride, but its sensational plot does not undercut its exploration of critical ideas, specifically the necessity of memory, truth, and justice.

When the Dead are Razed by Samuel Thomas Martin. Slant Books, September 2021.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

Sarett’s ‘The Looking Glass’

Guest Post by Susan I. Weinstein.

“A female artist fights for success in a world dominated by men and expectations of conventional sexuality in The Looking Glass, novella by Carla Sarett.” —Propertius Press

Claire Charles, a member of 1930s New York high society, has been trained in painting in preparation for marriage, but shocks everyone by pursuing art as a career and her own inclinations. In Paris, fifteen years later, she collides with Leah, a mysterious artist who has been secretly painting for her husband. When Kay Charles, Claire’s 16-year year old niece, reluctantly models for a portrait, the lives of the three women become intertwined. Claire’s voice alternates with James, a handsome art dealer, and Kay, who claims a special legacy. From Manhattan to Paris, galleries to artist colonies, from the 1930s to the 1970s, The Looking Glass is a story about women, art, and memory.

I found this story particularly moving for what’s rarely shown: how women artists have lived and worked in two worlds, the public one under the male gaze and the private one where freedom from the male gaze and power structure is essential for creativity and love that’s meaningful.

The Looking Glass by Carla Sarett. Propertius Press, October 2021.

Susan I. Weinstein worked as an in-house publicity writer for publishers, before starting Susan Weinstein PR. She is the author of The Anarchist’s Girlfriend, Paradise Gardens, and Tales of the Mer Family Onyx; published in New Editions by Pelekinesis. Her play, ETHER: The Strange Afterlife of Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was workshopped 12/19 at I.R.T. Theater in NYC. notanotherbookreview.blogspot.com is her book review blog.

A Homey Little Book

Guest Post by Petra Mucnjak.

This novel begins with a young girl named Emily Benedict returning to the small town of Mullaby, where her mother had grown up and her grandfather still resides. Although her grandfather’s demeanor appears to be somewhat aloof, her grandfather welcomes Emily home, generously offering her the choice of picking one of his many empty spare rooms as her bedroom. Naturally, the girl chooses her mother’s former room and soon realizes that it possesses an extraordinary air to it. Then there is the issue of the mysterious lights which have the habit of appearing over the lake at night . . .

The Girl Who Chased The Moon is the first book I have read by Sarah Addison Allen and, expecting a syrupy family-reconciliation-romance novel, I was delightfully surprised upon encountering a humorous, warm, humane tale about family, friends, and how being haunted by the ghosts of the past doesn’t necessarily have to mean havoc. Miss Allen’s writing is very poetic, her words luring the reader into her small American town with no more or less than the charm of a siren. Sentences like “The air outside was tomato-sweet and hickory-smokey, all at once delicious and strange,” brought me into the center of this wonderful atmosphere, making my senses hum.

Continue reading “A Homey Little Book”

An Intimate Look at Being Human

Guest Post by Antonio Addessi.

In Anatomy of Want, Lee takes us deep into the intimacy between lovers, the memories they create, hold on to and try to forget but can’t. Through his talent for noticing the small details of everyday life, he arouses all of the senses, often on the same line or stanza.

In poems like “Compliments to the Cook” and “La Cocina,” Lee wafts the scents of fragrant food into our noses and holds up the spoon to our mouths to taste the poems coming off the pages. The longing to love and be loved is stitched tightly into each line as we’re carried through cityscapes with lively streets and dark bedrooms with empty beds all reminding us of lovers lost.

Anatomy of Want is an enticing and heartfelt ode to what it means to give part of yourself to the people you allow close to you. In it we see ourselves as the speaker, the holder of secrets and the teller of truths sometimes hard to swallow. The nostalgia exudes itself onto every page—evoked by memories of sorrow and loss, of growing up too fast and living in an often foreign feeling state that is strangely familiar. Its Americana places us deep in the heart of Manhattan’s subway systems and the long aisles of grocery stores filled with people that infinitely stay strangers. This book is definitely on the edge of what poetry is going to look and feel like for years to come. It is one that deserves to be read and reread for it’s intimate look at what being human truly is.

Anatomy of Want by Daniel W. K. Lee. Rebel Satori Press, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Antonio Addessi is a poet and writer living in New York City. He received his MFA from Columbia University (’20) and his debut book of poetry Sleeptalking, published by Rebel Satori Press, comes out April 2022.

Taking Stock of America’s Two Decades in Afghanistan

Guest Post by Marc Martorell Junyent.

The border between current events and history is a blurry one. David Kilcullen and Greg Mills tread on both sides of this imaginary boundary in The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan. The co-authors have a long experience in Afghanistan working for the international military coalition in the country.

Throughout the book, they manifest their frustration for the chaotic evacuation of US citizens and Afghans that unfolded in August 2021. In their own words, “it would not have taken a rocket scientist to devise a better, more orderly, system.”

Their criticism extends to a much longer time period, however. According to the authors, the West never had a clear strategy in Afghanistan. By focusing on short-term goals, the troops and economic aid deployed to the country did not help build solid structures, but only delayed the collapse of a system based on clientelism, corruption, and the inclusion of former warlords.

Kilcullen and Mills argue that not inviting the Taliban to sit at the negotiation table in the 2001 Bonn Conference, convened right after their overthrow from power, was a key missed opportunity. The US ended up negotiating with the Taliban in the 2020 Doha Agreement from a much weaker position.

The Ledger is particularly strong in the anecdotical evidence it presents, based on the authors’ wide range of contacts among Afghan elites and Western officials. On the contrary, the reader would probably have welcomed a more consistent book structure. The continuous chronological and thematical shifts are often confusing and lead to redundancies.

When it comes to the immediate future of Afghanistan, Kilcullen and Mills defend the idea that the restoration of aid flows to the country is needed for both humanitarian reasons and maintaining a certain influence with the Taliban.

The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills. Hurst, January 2022.

Reviewer bio: Marc Martorell Junyent graduated in International Relations and currently studies a joint Master in Comparative Middle East Politics and Society at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the American University in Cairo. His main interests are the politics and history of the Middle East (particularly Iran, Turkey and Yemen). He has studied and worked in Ankara, Istanbul and Tunis. He tweets at @MarcMartorell3.

A Journey of Self Discovery

Guest Post by Mille King.

Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls represents the term ‘tear-jerker’; it explores themes of pain, loss, and guilt in a real and relatable way. It is clear that Conor, the protagonist, sees himself as a monster for wanting the pain he is going through to be over, even if this means losing his mother. This guilt manifests in a physical monster who he believes visits him but no one else can see. The monster helps Conor through his pain and helps him discover emotions even Conor didn’t know he had.

Ness shows how guilt comes from deep down and we often can’t acknowledge it because we cover it with lies and believe what we want to believe, even when we don’t actually fully believe it. This is a beautiful journey of self discovery and I loved every moment of it.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Walker Books / Candlewick Press, May 2011.

Reviewer bio: My name is Millie King, I am an English literature major and read not only for school, but for fun too! I always struggled with dyslexia so reading was hard for me but I have overcome those obstacles and am an avid book reader!

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‘The Midnight Lie’

Guest Post by Shaelynn Long.

Marie Rutkoski’s The Midnight Lie is a riveting combination of a society rooted in socioeconomic and hierarchical issues and a young woman who believes the life of crime she has chosen was, in fact, her choice. When the main character, Nirrim, discovers that the rules that were seemingly in place to keep her safe are doing more than that, she partners up with a gorgeous traveler, Sid, to find out more about the magic within the places she’s been kept from.

The story has it all: excitement, a love interest, magic, and mystery. It would also be remiss not to mention the LGBTQ nature of the romantic plotline, which is told beautifully. Overall, the story is worth the read, especially if you’re seeking something rooted in the fantastical that still discusses the problematic nature of the relationships between those who have and those who do not.

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Shaelynn Long is a Michigan-based author who spends the majority of her free time consuming all the books she can, often while surrounded by her three dogs. She is the author of Blur, Work In Progress, and Dirt Road Kid. You can find more about Shaelynn at her website.

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Discovering Not New Fiction

Guest Post by Raymond Abbott.

This book is not new, so what you get is not new fiction as the title suggests. New Fiction from New England was published in 1986 by Yankee Books in Dublin, New Hampshire. Twenty-nine stories and not a clunker in the bunch. All were originally published in Yankee Magazine back when Yankee published stories (fiction). It no longer does, and it is lesser in my opinion as a magazine for no longer doing so. The editor then was Deborah Navas, a skillful writer in her own right.

If you’re looking for variety, and solid storytelling, you will get it here, in abundance, that is if you can find a copy. But do try!

New Fiction From New England edited by Deborah Navas. Yankee Books, 1986.

Reviewer bio: Raymond Abbott lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Finding the Childlike Magic Within

Guest Post by Haydyn Wallender.

For as long as she can remember, Scarlett Dragna has dreamed of Caraval: a magical show where fantasy and reality collide. Legend, the mastermind behind the show, has declined to return any of Scarlett’s letters of urgency to see his magic—until now.

Swept off of her island by a mysterious sailor, Scarlett and her sister Tella aren’t just players of the show—they are the main attractions. Whisked into a world where nothing is as it seems, and with countless warnings to not believe what her eyes tell her, Scarlett learns that following her heart is the only way to find the truth—and her sister—before it’s too late.

Garber’s language and characters make the magic of her story come to life. Creating a strong bond between her readers and her characters using childlike wonder, hope infuses the pages with every turn, despite all the tension, confusion, and panic that is a common theme throughout this novel.

This book marvelously captures what it’s like to be caught in between a child and a young adult, where themes of love, sisterhood, and courage fill the pages. Garber’s ease of writing a story so full of twists using these themes is evident in her style and the composition of her work; each chapter seems to build up to something larger, as if Legend himself is creating the storyline. It is a wonderful novel for all who are grasping for that little bit of child—and magic—still left in oneself.

“Magic will find those with pure hearts, even when all seems lost.” ―Morgan Rhodes

Caraval by Stephanie Garber. Flatiron Books, May 2018.

Reviewer bio: Haydyn Wallender is an insatiable reader, writer and reviewer. Her experience with written work(s) extends back through her undergraduate, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Washington State University. Her writing style and English-based experiences can be found at her website: (haydynwallendershowcase.com).

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One Fierce Follow-up

Guest Post by Carla Sarett.

A long weekend, and no page-turner in sight. Luckily, Carry The Dog by Stephanie Gangi arrived in my mailbox. Gangi’s debut novel, The Next, was fiercely funny; while this one’s not a comedy, it is every bit as fierce.

At almost 60, Manhattanite Bea Marx lives with an icy legacy: her mother, Miriam, took erotic pictures of her kids (the “Marx Nudes) and then killed herself after the death of Bea’s teenaged brother. Now, Bea’s life seems on hold: she’s even married the same philandering man twice. She’s obsessed with how things look (like wrinkles and Balenciaga bags) but she fails to see people realistically; she’s locked herself out. When Hollywood and MOMA come knocking for Miriam’s story, Bea starts to confront childhood truths. She finds layers and layers to unwrap, each progressively darker. But Gangi’s not after the darkness: this is a story of possibilities.

I disagreed, on many levels, with Bea’s final decision. But I am still thinking about it. That is a lot for one book to accomplish.

Carry the Dog by Stephanie Gangi. Algonquin Books, November 2021.

Reviewer bio: Carla Sarett’s novella about maverick female artists, The Looking Glass, was published by Propertius Press in October, 2021.

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