Review by Rebecca Jane Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Geri Lipschultz Emotionally and thematically resonant, Barbara Henning’s thirteenth book is a slim volume of sixty-nine entries, quasi-biographical and quasi-epistolary in nature. Even the title reflects a quality of compression and intimacy that characterizes these entries:…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s…
Monster Galaxy by Cindy Veach Review by Ruth Hoberman On the cover of Monster Galaxy, Cindy Veach’s new book of poems, Athena glows in gold armor, having sprung powerful and fully formed from her father Zeus’s forehead. The…
Review by Angela Williamson Thoughtfully curated, Commodore Rookery, by Christy Lee Barnes, captures and recasts the first year of parenthood. Through the lens of the rookery, where the speaker goes for inspiration, insight, and wonder, the familiar challenges of…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason I first became familiar with Jennifer Lang’s writing just after she published her first book, Places We Left Behind. It included all the ingredients I enjoy in a memoir: a cross-cultural story, an unusual structure,…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson is smart, sexy, highly relatable book. Lipson’s prose delves into what it means to be a woman, mother, and daughter and had me exclaiming, “Yes! Exactly!”…
Review by Emily Webber Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, follows the unforgettable Rosenberg family—consisting of Leon, Louise, and their daughter Lydia —over forty years as they navigate life, especially in the face of a terminal…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Unassuming women of fierce literary imaginations can find themselves historically reduced to spinsterhood or a perceived existence of wistful eccentricity, myths that contribute to a legacy of emotional isolation that diminishes their artistic prowess. In…
Review by Jane Ward “It’s pitch black and Alice won’t stop screaming.” (4) Two pages into The Fun Times Brigade, author Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and I am fully transported to my own…