Books Available for Review July 2023
Email us at [email protected] for the full list of available books.
Frances Donovan, Arboretum In A Jar, Lily Poetry Review Books 2023
In this rich collection of poems, Frances Donovan weaves lyric poetry with memoir, dramatic personae with careful self-reflection, all in complex meditation on trauma, sexual awakening, recovery, and femininity. Complex and deeply moving, Arboretum in a Jar is a book I will return to with great pleasure. – Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction and How He Loved Them
Emily Hockaday, In a Body. Harbor Editions 2023. Through a feminist and ecopoetic lens, In a Body considers the ecosystem of the ill body in contrast to the ecosystems around us. In addition to themes of ecology and chronic pain, this collection touches on parenting, grief, and the urban environment. Joan Kwon Glass says: “These brief and breathtaking poems ask us to consider the ways in which both our bodies and our world betray, buoy, and surprise us, posing questions about science, love, vulnerability, mortality, and suffering.”
Amanda Galvan Huynh, Where My Umbilical is Buried. Sundress Publication 2023.
Where My Umbilical Is Buried offers a disarmingly precise series of poems about the intergenerational struggle to establish a sense of home when home offers its own turbulence. The reality of the working class Latinx families in America looms large over these poems. It haunts them, transfixes them, but in the process these poems create a deeply personal space where this struggle is transformed. In this collection there is a longing for home that goes past the social reality, past the domestic sphere, towards the celestial womb. There is a sense of longing on a cosmic scale, a yearning that stretches towards the stars. These poems heal, they flicker, they are a way of digging into the darkness and growing from the ground up.— Mike Soto, author of A Grave Is Given Supper.
Margaret Ray, Good Grief, the Ground: Poems. Boa Editions 2023
Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground (April 11. 2023) interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted unto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from a bad marriage, and the mess of tenderness, darkness, and animosity. In the words of Stephanie Burt: “Come and see. Take care. Dive in.”
Jeri Theriault, Self-Portrait as Homestead. Deerbrook Editions 2023
This collection has placed as a semi-finalist at Perugia and as a finalist at Jacar Press, as well as honorable mention for the 2023 Grayson Prize. Self-Portrait As Homestead presents various speakers as the accumulated voice of one character who is girl—woman—mother—grandmother. These poems are fully inhabited by real people like my grandmother and other members of my family. I am especially in love with the “girl cousins” who show up in several poems. Here are many incidents, places and people who come from my life. Here is my dad. Here is the upstairs apartment where my grandparents lived. These voices intentionally blur the narrative, which is not linear, but rather a collage of experience.