Review by Mary Fontana Tina Kelley won a 2003 Washington State Book Award for her first book of poems, The Gospel of Galore. Her recently published fifth collection, the witty and observant Field Guide to North American Words, does for language what a good guidebook does for flora and fauna, presenting living specimens to seek out and marvel at, and drawing the reader toward greater intimacy with the world. Language and guidebooks are at their most useful, and exacting, when they tease out nuances between closely related things. Here Kelley explores the fine shades of meaning between this word…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jane Ward It was fitting to begin reading The Fall-Down Effect, Liz Johnston’s forceful debut novel featuring a family unraveling amid environmental crisis, at the tail end of a summer that saw much of the world baking and a wide swath of Canadian wilderness burning out of control. This was the second summer in a row that I took note of the smoke and haze of these fires drifting down and across the northern United States. The pervasive smell and particulate matter couldn’t avoided. The Fall-Down Effect shows us that these circumstances should not be ignored. The…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Chiara DiLello’s eloquent and determined debut collection has much to say about the personal and cultural complexities of being a contemporary woman without children. It also summoned a memory from my early writing years. In 1984, I was interviewed with a friend and writing colleague when we coedited an anthology of women’s poetry and prose, Island Women, published with a grant from the American Association of University Women. We were excited for the publicity this could bring to the book, which was a project of the Women Writers Alliance, a local group of female creatives…
Review by Jessica de Koninck When my husband died a friend of his who had also lost a spouse said to me, You will find you become the other person. True. I began to see things, to hear things the way my husband would have seen or heard them. In her beautifully felt collection, At the Hour of Now (Bordighera Press, 2026), Maria Lisella, former Queens poet laureate and author of three previous collections, “becomes” her late spouse. Like the small family of three the poems depict, the collection is divided into three sections. In those poems the poet…
Review by Justine Pechuzal Sadiqa de Meijer’s essay collection In the Field begins with loss—that of a writer’s cherished notebook—and thus frames a series of investigations into the finite. The scope is broad: from a medical student questioning the constraints of modern healthcare, to a Holocaust victim’s perception of humanity “[Etty] … possessed such a presence that even within a nightmare she could see the world,” (158) de Meijer observes and probes the world with laser-sharp finesse. Who are we? Where do we belong? How do we make meaning? Much of what de Meijer finds is unsettling. Returning to…
Review by Emily Webber Growing up with the Genesis story, Eve was always framed as either a cautionary example or the root of all human suffering, but B.K. O’Connor’s novel, Eve, takes a different path. From the start, the book steers away from moral condemnation and replaces it with something everyone should find compelling: curiosity about the world and what it means to be alive. O’Connor presents a woman on a journey to find answers and create a life on her own terms. She doesn’t want to be told what to do, and she doesn’t want to simply fill…
Review by Michelle Panik My bank had written and called—multiple times—with news that they were phasing out safe deposit boxes, and I would need to remove my things. While I clearly remembered some of the box’s contents, which my memory was hazy about others. But they all had to be important; if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have locked them in a bank vault 15 miles from my home. I was halfway through Kim Danielson’s Piece by Piece: A Life of Remembered through Things Lost when I finally went to collect my things. As I drove the final few miles…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason The written Chinese character for “mouth” is a square. It’s also included in more complex characters for words like “eat”, “drink”, “breathe”, and “cry”, all words central to the necessities of life. In her recent book of poetry, An Orange, A Syllable, Gillian Sze writes about motherhood and marriage through the imagery of characters like “mouth”, as well as descriptions from pieces of art and literature. Most of Sze’s poems are short pieces of prose, although she also includes a handful of poems that follow a different format: the light insofar the light as…
Edited by Melissa Joplin Higley New and forthcoming books (listed by publication date). Elizabeth O’Rourke, Rewoven in the Dew, Kelsay Books, June 2026, poetry Rewoven in the Dew explores shades of what life asks of us when we are committed to noticing. Through experiences of young & committed love, the prairie of new motherhood, the heartbreak of medical missteps, and even encounters with women of the Bible, this collection weaves patience and trust for what inevitably comes next. Aimee Suzara, Birth Language, Tia Chucha Press, August 2026, poetry Aimee Suzara’s second full-length book Birth Language centers on…
Poetry Folio Edited by Carla Panciera and Cindy Veach Amid the hothouse needs and cares blooming around me, how often I disappear.—Sarah Sadie The poems in this folio explore one of motherhood’s dualities: the mother the world sees and the woman inside who possesses a sense of self that existed before her children were born and who persists despite them. Outwardly, she may be giving herself away by prioritizing her family; inwardly, she may be quietly taking inventory of what remains hers and thinking, as Anna Crandall writes, “I am homesick for myself.” The voices in these poems…