Rue Matthiessen Castles & Ruins—A Challenging Narrative. When I undertook to return to Ireland with my young family to try to find a castle called Annaghkeen, that I had lived near to as a child, I certainly did not…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Lara Lillibridge Castles and Ruins is a quiet, ruminative memoir shifting between the narrator’s year in Ireland as a child and her return years later as an adult with her husband and six-year-old son. Rue’s father, Peter…
Review by Christina Kelly This quietly searing collection of poems by Ann E. Wallace documents the confusion, pain and terror of the Covid pandemic, beginning when she first became severely ill in March 2020. Wallace, the 2023-24 Poet Laureate…
Review by Jane Ward On the first day of first grade, my daughter and I walked into a room decorated by her new teacher with the usual lively trimmings: a colorful reading area rug, labeled cubbies for puzzles and…
Review by Ellen Meeropol When the reader first meets Mia, she is trying to find her bra. “I live in my car,” she tells us, “and I only have one bra. It has to be around here somewhere. I…
Review by Carole Mertz Rollender Ties Her Faith Concepts to Her Poetic Vision Nicole Rollender’s emotional and richly endowed poems touch the heart. Very personal, they cover themes of maternal love, dreams and dreaming, religiosity, sobriety, marital fidelity,…
Review by Nicole Callihan “Can you see why I mother every possible thing?” Kai Coggin asks in Mother of Other Kingdoms. Here, in “Tender and Ache,” the poet has scooped a bumble bee from the windowpane, cupped his slow…
Review by Laura Dennis I know Syracuse, or at least I thought I did. My mother’s family lives just north of that city in the heart of New York’s snowbelt, homeland of the Onondaga. All that changed when I…
Review by Melanie McGehee Mulberry Street Stories by Mary Slechta won the 2021 Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, an award that celebrates the best in contemporary fiction by writers of the African Diaspora. These twenty-five interwoven stories told in 190…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg So much is summoned in the diminutive but sleek and dark edition of Ex Machina, or perhaps “unleashed” is a better word. The poems in this collection by Joan Naviyuk Kane pulse with language that…