Bettering American Poetry 2015: An Anthology Eds Allen, Kim, King, Koo, Martinez, Ramirez, Sama, Villarreal & Wallschläger Reviewed by Carole Mertz The Bettering American Poetry 2015 project grew out of discontent. A group of editors were disgruntled by the…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Janet McCann Sarah Dickenson Snyder is a mother and English teacher as well as a poet who has published in a wide variety of journals and won several awards. Her chapbook Notes from a Nomad is forthcoming…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Diane Stiglich, a writer and painter in Hoboken, New Jersey, captivates readers with her debut novel. A quick read at 134 pages, it is officially three interconnected stories, but they flow into each other so…
Review by Anne Britting Oleson Donald Rumsfeld famously said that we don’t know what we don’t know. In her literary memoir run scream unbury save, Katherine McCord makes this very clear, and this engenders a certain anxiety in her…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg In World Enough and Time, Mary Makofske finds inspiration in the persistent observation of human engagement. Whether in an overheard conversation or the witnessed pantomime of curious children, we learn to fill life’s cautionary path…
Review by Grace Gardiner Even before opening the lush and deceptively textured cover of Ann Cefola’s Free Ferry, the reader is alerted to the collection’s investigation of and rumination on instability vs. stability, ephemerality vs. longevity. The smooth,…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn Sarah W. Bartlett’s Slow Blooming Gratitudes opens with “Milkweed”, a poem that serves as a welcome, an invitation, and a directive about the joyful service of her written work: I want my words…
Review by Linda Lerner In the poem “The Palace,” a child who was never conceived is trapped in a palace destroyed “in seconds” (6)–a repetitive phrase used in the poem–but “still left standing” and she becomes the central…
Reviewed by Marcela Fuentes What She Was Saying, a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Award, delves into memory and desire, loss and longing, and the unexpected pathos of the commonplace. In these finely-wrought stories, Marjorie Maddox reveals the complex…
Reviewed by Libby Maxey At seventy pages, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow is too long to be a chapbook, but it has that feel: focused, intimate, slight yet substantial. Peg Alford Pursell’s stories tend toward poetic…