Review by Mary Ellen Talley We enter Laura Garrard’s debut poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, with “Paddling the Sweet Spot,” a poem in quatrains that introduces readers to strength and strategy in water sports…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Cameron Walker As I read Samina Najmi’s moving essay collection, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, I was reminded of a game we played as children in our school library. We’d gather…
Review by Emily Webber The characters in Suzanne Kamata’s short stories in River of Dolls are often caught between cultures, wishing for things they don’t have, and in transit to their next job, relationship, or new home. Big things…
Review by Julia Lisella Dorian Elizabeth Knapp asks the questions everyone is thinking—what is poetry in the age of AI? What is poetry in the face of a dying planet? What is poetry at the cusp of a democracy…
Review by Sharon Tracey Laura Cresté’s first full-length poetry collection, In the Good Years, opens with dead horses and ancestors, garden slugs and chipmunks, and two feisty and devoted mothers. There’s an immediacy and honesty as the poet…
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason Diane Botnick writes in the prologue of her novel, Becoming Sarah, that a midwife at Auschwitz delivered 3000 babies and most were brutally murdered as soon as they were born. Only 30 survived. She imagines…
Review by Melissa Kutsche The events of Susan Buttenwieser’s debut novel, Junction of Earth and Sky, are set into motion by World War II, but this is not a typical World War II novel. Instead of epic battles, Buttenwieser…
Review by Rebecca Jane The Seeds empowers fresh perception, until perception become synonymous with ecological compassion. These poems stir thought, wisdom, and sensitivity to notice “the immeasurable / heartbreaks of the field” (3) so that we may embrace our…
Review by Emily Webber Jennifer Eli Bowen’s memoir in essays, The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There, covers twenty years, exploring topics such as marriage, motherhood, the transformative power of writing, and different kinds of communities—when…
Review by Mary Makofske From the title poem, “At the Redemption Center,” where the prosaic recycling of bottles and cans slides into “hope…for the redemption of us all,” Anne Sandor demonstrates her skill at turning words and situations over…