Book Reviews
Review by Anna Laura Reeve Kirsten Shu-ying Chen’s impressive debut centers her experience caring for her dying mother, and the established structures and systems that erode under the influence of that grief. These poems exist in a liminal space, functioning…
Review by Carla Panciera Remember when you discovered that Disney hadn’t gotten it right with their version of fairy tales? How they’d left out the rape of Sleeping Beauty, for example, or the fact that it was Snow White’s mother…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Terra Incognita follows Sara Henning’s much-lauded View from True North, co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. In her second collection, winner of the…
Review by Lynn McGee A design motif on Pools of June by Mary Meriam is the image of bubbles. They appear on the cover, fill an illustrated figure diving into water on the frontispiece, tumble skyward on the title…
Review by Jennifer Saunders Revisiting Medusa in the Age of #MeToo: A Review of Head of a Gorgon by Raegen M. Pietrucha Harm abounds in Raegen M. Pietrucha’s debut full-length poetry collection Head of a Gorgon, but so…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In A River Within Spills Light, Jane Attanucci’s debut full-length poetry collection, she melds being a mother, a grandmother, and a daughter whose mother died prematurely in both form and free verse. Attanucci is…
Review by Lara Lillibridge I personally love story collections in the summer—the small bits fit nicely into a busy schedule and the time away from the book allows the words to linger, as I roll them over…
Review by Lynn McGee “The End of Horses” is a book title that puts the concept of finality squarely in the reader’s view. It challenges the cognitive dissonance that enables us to go about our lives unhampered by the despair…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg A favorite course of mine back in graduate school (under the tutelage of poet Julie Sheehan) was a “First Books” examination of established contemporary poets, seeing their early literary discoveries and distinctive voices take shape…
Review by Abby Orenstein Ash Popular culture flattens the lives of disabled people beyond caricature, reducing the complexity of lived existence to a simplistic narrative that either wallows in pain and exploitation or relies on sports cliches of odds-defiance…