Review by Barbara Harroun – Samantha Duncan’s intimate, inventive, and gloriously imaginative chapbook-length poem The Birth Creatures examines and gives new eyes and voice to the post-partum experience. Duncan, the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) and Moon Law (Wild Age…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Kerry Neville – Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deeply ingrained in both popular and academic culture (spin-offs, references, paraphernalia, and the academic journal Slayage). Josh Whedon, the series creator, has explained that he explicitly developed Buffy as a feminist…
Review by Jennifer Martelli – From the opening title poem where we are told, “Never mind what your mother says” (3) to the closing poem “Chained Reaction” where Betts writes The top of my mother’s hand is tan shallot skinand…
Review by Christina Mock – Marianne Smith Johnson’s collection Tender Collisions is a rollercoaster of the loss, grief, joy, and love we experience every day. It pulls the reader out of the routine of daily life to remind her that life…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth – Wisdom, wit, and compassion characterize Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s first book of poems, Imperfect Tense. A Professor of TESOL and World Languages Education at the University of Georgia, she charts her extensive terrain in the book’s first poem,…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – His office is covered floor to ceiling / in photos of infants’ faces / stuck to the walls with long needles. / I lie upon a bed lined with butcher paper. (29) Experiencing life vicariously through…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg – No one wants to talk about the sick child. Corrugated sadness, apologies baited with fear the mousetrap faces of those with healthy kids, shut. The difficult truth of these 21 skillful poems by Suzanne Edison…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor – Is it possible for poetry to transcend grief? Can a visceral reaction in the body be expressed in language? In this debut poetry collection, Kelly Hansen Maher vacillates between an original vocabulary of loss— they…
Review by Meg Reynolds – Winner of the 2014 White Pine Press Poetry Prize SOME GIRLS blends of contemporary and ancient story. McNally bends time on purpose, lending myth into women’s stories and humanity to myth. McNally remembers what is…
Review by Carole Mertz – Diane Lockward, author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, has had poems featured in Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is endorsed by Lee Upton, poet and…