Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley
Hollay Ghadery, Widow Fantasies, Gordon Hill Press, September 2024, fiction (short stories).
The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women. https://www.gordonhillpress.com/products/widow-fantasies
Patricia Caspers, The Most Kissed Woman in the World, Kelsay Books, April 2024, poetry.
There is so much beauty in Patricia Caspers’ The Most Kissed Woman in the World, and a lot of darkness, too. In each “Portrait of God,” Caspers finds the sacred somewhere unexpected: a pungent ginkgo tree; an assisted living facility; a dysfunctional family; the self in all its gorgeous imperfections. These lyrical, surprising poems look at the world with hard-won clarity and tenderness, embracing joy without turning away from suffering. “God is the kitchen knife that misses,” Caspers writes, as well as “the crash of abundance.” Exactly. The Most Kissed Woman is sharp and generous and wise, reminding us where we hurt and also, in its revelatory unfoldings, why we go on. –Chloe Martinez (And thank you!) https://kelsaybooks.com/collections/all/patricia-caspers
Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios, A Concerto for an Empty Frame, Kelsay Books, October 2023, poetry.
Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ new poetry collection is like listening to a powerful concerto by Mozart or Beethoven presented in the form of a musical score, complete with Italian notation indicating the mood of poems: Con fuoco, Furioso, Lacrimoso etc. The reader is guided through the initiation stage of this epic, to the poet’s darkest nights of the soul—the shock and grief of a son lost to the tragic bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland – and ultimately a stepping away from grief, as “Blue startles the air open like an egg.” The innovative forms reveal a deeper musical context of the work: dynamics are represented by shaded fonts, poems divided down the middle become two poems read separately or together acting as a duet between solo instrument and orchestra, and the creative pagination at the end is meant as a cadenza, entitled the Rag Lady Casts a Spell. The definitions are poems, such as the definition of “concerto:” “Mus: One thousand yellow finches lift off a late summer river all at once.” Throughout the work the poet is the soloist in this concerto, supported by a multi-voiced symphony orchestra, the struggle of the poet’s soul against the inevitable darkness of the world: two separate voices creating music. together.https://kelsaybooks.com/products/a-concerto-for-an-empty-frame-music-for-survival
Britt Kaufmann, Midlife Calculus, Press 53, September 2024, poetry.
Britt Kaufmann set out to take calculus for the first time at age 47 so she could cross it off her bucket list. (And so she could take it before her twin sons did the following year.) She did not expect it to lead to her first full-length collection of poetry: Midlife Calculus. Calculus is the study of how things change, so it’s a fitting title for poems about midlife, about learning something difficult and new, and the inevitable season when children leave home. These poems, often short, bear witness to the struggles of parents, teachers, and students. And, like any woman’s romp through perimenopause, the mood and tone vary wildly, but always with a call to reflect and find moments of peace and purpose, to “work literal equations / and maybe wonders, / figure the balance between expectations / and grace.” https://www.press53.com/britt-kaufmann
Joanne De Simone, Fall and Recovery, She Writes Press, September 2024, memoir.
Special educator Joanne De Simone bares all in this raw and transformative memoir that captures how she used lessons of modern dance in her journey through motherhood with two children with disabilities. When the pediatrician places the measuring tape around her infant’s head and notes, “His head is a little small,” Joanne knows that motherhood won’t be as she had dreamt. Even as a special educator, Joanne isn’t prepared to raise a child with a life-limiting brain malformation. Nor is she ready for the compounded pain and alienation that comes when her second son is diagnosed with autism. But the struggle to balance her sons’ medical and educational challenges drives Joanne to reconnect with the lessons she learned as a modern dancer—and there she finds enlightenment. https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Recovery-Raising-Children-Disabilities/dp/1647427142/
Nicole Callihan, chigger ridge, The Word Works, June 2024, poetry.
“chigger ridge is an invocation, a beckoning. An investigation of the “dark places” of both body and landscape. A close look at Southern girlhood and a landscape of mountains, mined, stripped, empty. An angel speaks while a cat’s eye marble rolls. Danger threatens; language slips and quickens. Nicole Callihan’s new book is a brilliant excavation of landscape, language, and escape.” —Nicole Cooley, author of Mother Water Ash. https://wordworksbooks.org/product/chigger-ridge/