Review by Suzanne Kamata – What a voice! With her dark sense of humor and her lively, inventive prose, Kirstin Scott, author of the award-winning Motherlunge, can make even the most mundane aspects of suburban life – recycling, for instance…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Book Note by Jim Elledge – Using Hurricane Sandy as the backdrop and nominal reason for writing Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination, May Joseph investigates how vulnerable—and dependent—New York and New Yorkers are to ecology. Although…
Review by Jennifer Jean – “Why does it look like that?” my seven year old Chloe asked a few weeks ago, pointing to my bare breast as I tried to squeeze into an outworn swimsuit. I liked her question. “It’s a…
Review by Nancy Vona – Felice Aull’s The Music Behind Me is a fine book of poetry. Aull’s poems are satisfying to read. I enjoyed the poems on an emotional level, but I was also challenged to be a better…
Review by Teresa Schartel Narey – In her debut poetry collection, Instructions for Preparing Your Skin, Ariana Nadia Nash unabashedly reveals how deeply personal experiences forever mark our bodies. The poems are honest and courageous; Nash makes wounds feel like…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader – In the twenty stories of Heather Tosteson’s Germs of Truth no one is left out. All told from a first-person viewpoint, they are populated with adopted children, reluctant mothers, lesbian couples, blended families, resentful…
Review by Ann E. Michael – Poetry books offer the opportunity to travel, vicariously, to new environments. They also muster the reader out of her own perspective through the poet’s various chosen arts: syntax, imagery, rhythm, vocabulary, metaphor, and so…
by Christine Orchanian Adler – Motherhood may be a universal experience, but it is a deeply personal journey for every woman. For some, it is seemingly effortless; for others, the challenges can be crushing. In her chapbook, Turning Cozy Dark,…
Review by Lisa Cheby – As anyone who has experienced or witnessed mourning knows, the process of grieving is not linear, but indeed a whirlwind of anger, blindness, and, in rarer moments, stillness and clarity with a weight as palpable…
Review by Katie Manning – Butterflies Under a Japanese Moon is the sort of poetry collection that should come with a warning label. WARNING: This book will suck you in and force you to read it straight through in one…