Review by Melanie McGehee In her latest book, Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell, long-time educator and writer, finally tells her own story. Her prior books celebrate the lives of what might be considered ordinary working people. In them, she…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Christy Lee Barnes In Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, an atheist’s prayers conjure up snakes and possums. Snakes, her deepest fear. And a possum, whose “deep blue / milk, lets her babies / cling…
Review by Lara Lillibridge A good poem is a fleeting emotion captured and held on a page, then released into the heart of the reader to linger. And as women and mothers, we need that pause in our day…
Review by Celia Jeffries “Throughout my journey of motherhood, there have been moments when I wanted to check out. That’s it. I’m done. These were moments when I was sleep-deprived, I was seeing stars behind the actual objects I…
Review by Robbi Nester A first-generation child of immigrants must construct a hyphenated identity, intersection between two different worlds. Judy Kronenfeld’s memoir, Apartness (Inlandia, 2025) takes this process of acculturation as its subject, making the book’s hybrid form, a…
Review by Jeanne Yu Nancy Miller Gomez’s dazzling debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects exposes the unsuspecting inconsolable objects we are born as and those we create in our human path as women and mothers. Gomez challenges boundaries, words push…
Review by Jane Ward Jen Michalski, award-winning author of 2021’s You’ll Be Fine, returns in June with All This Can Be True. Using alternating narratives, Michalski first explores the complex interior lives of two women as they take…
Review by Emily Hall Miranda Schmidt’s debut novel Leafskin is slippery. Part prose, part poetry, the novel begins as a realistic portrayal of a woman struggling to conceive. The protagonist, Jo, is undergoing IVF treatments with Liam, her…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader Lisa C. Taylor’s novel The Shape of What Remains (Between the Lines Publishing/Liminal Press, 2025) is narrated by Teresa Calvano, a professor, wife, and mother whose second-born child was killed at the age of…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, the poet uses the metaphor of fungi to thread a masterful spell of poems that shimmer with dark energy, electricity, and transmutations as she explores childhood, family history,…