Review by Barbara Harroun – On encountering the hurricane-force voice of The Treasures That Prevail’s opening poem, “Miami as the Narrator of the Next Great American Novel: A Personetelle,” I knew I was going to dive deeply, coming up…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Carole Mertz – It’s apparent from reading this collection of seven stories and from viewing the author’s blogspot that Ms. Mintz, a former assistant English professor, wants her stories to affect you and that she places writing…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg – One of the things that is delightfully deceptive about L.B. Williams’s chapbook, The Eighth Phrase, is how it plays with appearances: urban landscapes, family gatherings, the crouched hiding places of youth and the immense and…
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…
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…