New and Coming Soon Sarah Gutowski, The Familiar. TRP: The University Press of SHSU January 2024. Poetry The Familiar is a narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis. It mimics the bizarre, darkly funny experience of midlife by making literal the…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Cathy Ulrich’s second book, Small, Burning Things, she proves again how mighty flash fiction can be. These tight short stories are mostly women- or girl-centered, and all of the fiction brought in some…
Review by Melanie McGehee Amanda Galvan Huynh’s debut poetry book Where My Umbilical is Buried tells her Chicano family’s story. It is a scrapbook journey, taking us through towns of rural Texas and the lives of three generations, beginning…
Review by Jessica Manack Dedicated to her mother, the second collection of poems by Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, is a group of ruminations on being mothered and being a mother, and the way the former informs the latter,…
Review by Jiwon Choi Frances Donovan’s Arboretum in a Jar is an assertive and confident work in which the poet’s voice feels tautly woven into the cacophony of internal dilemmas and S.O.S mayhem fueling this who’s who in…
Review by Sarah Lyn Rogers In Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise, two sisters buckle under lifelong pressure from their mother, Rita, who immigrated with their father, Jing, from Taipei and made enormous sacrifices to ensure that the…
Review by Julia Lisella In Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fourth collection of poems, Transitory, an epigraph from Carolyn Forché instructs: “‘Poetry of witness’ . . . doesn’t mean to write about political matters; it means to write out of having…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg The poems in Carolina Hotchandani’s stunning debut comprise a woman’s journey to the self through many guises—daughter, scholar, mother, poet—and reveals how identity can be a fragile construct, whether inherited, imagined, or influenced by those…
New and Notable Lisa Grunberger, For the Future of Girls. Kelsay Books 2023. Poetry. For the Future of Girls is at once family album, inventory of memories, a reckoning with time, and a plea for love to last. Lisa Grunberger’s…
Review by Emily Webber Audra Kerr Brown’s collection of flash fiction, hush hush hush, at twelve stories and under forty pages, holds its power in its brevity. It is the shortest collection I’ve read this year, yet it stands…