Review by Grace Gardiner – The fairy tale has long served a dual purpose for the human imagination: one of warning, one of protection. The telling or reading of such stories alert us to the world’s continual balancing of…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Lara Lillibridge – There is no better time for flash fiction than the summer. In between corralling children to sporting events, the beach, and various summer destinations, flash or micro fiction gives a respite, like a lick of…
Review by Marcene Gandolfo – Whether read as a memoir in verse or a collection of poetry, A. M. O’Malley’s Expecting Something Else is a hybrid text that resists categorization. The collection of short prose poems reads as a nonlinear…
Review by Ivy Rutledge – Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is a refreshing voice in the realm of parenting books and spiritual autobiography. Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting blends…
Review by Michelle Wilbert – As I completed Atoosa Grey’s organically lush Black Hollyhock, I thought immediately of the nearly platonic ideal evoked by Mary Oliver in “Sometimes”: “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. /…
Review by Judith Swan – When the 19th century’s Anna Laetitia Barbauld addressed the less-than-classical theme of motherhood, the terms “sentiment” and “romanticized” were not the pejoratives they are today. Indeed, the cultivation of sentiment or emotion was a middle class…
Review by Issa M. Lewis – A first-time expectant mother looks for a roadmap as she prepares for her pregnancy, her birth, and her parenting. She asks questions of her friends, her sisters, her own mother; she mines…
Review by Libby Maxey – I’m rather new to the world of small fiction (also known as flash fiction, micro fiction, short shorts, sudden fiction, quick fiction—and there may be more names that I’ve yet to run across). As…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett – Amy Dryansky’s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. While writing this collection, Dryansky began a blog about the intersection of mother/artist/poet in her own and in other women’s lives. The…
Review by RZ Wiggins – Mothers are simple, complex, opaque, vivid, loving, distant, devoted, and neglectful, all in a lifetime. From its first pages, this slim volume overflows with the above and with a mother’s abundant love and commitment. Rosalie…