Review by Barbara Lawhorn Sarah W. Bartlett’s Slow Blooming Gratitudes opens with “Milkweed”, a poem that serves as a welcome, an invitation, and a directive about the joyful service of her written work: I want my words…
Review by Linda Lerner In the poem “The Palace,” a child who was never conceived is trapped in a palace destroyed “in seconds” (6)–a repetitive phrase used in the poem–but “still left standing” and she becomes the central…
Reviewed by Marcela Fuentes What She Was Saying, a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Award, delves into memory and desire, loss and longing, and the unexpected pathos of the commonplace. In these finely-wrought stories, Marjorie Maddox reveals the complex…
Reviewed by Libby Maxey At seventy pages, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow is too long to be a chapbook, but it has that feel: focused, intimate, slight yet substantial. Peg Alford Pursell’s stories tend toward poetic…
Reviewed by Julia Lisella Odd Mercy is aptly named. Alzheimer’s, explored in a crown of twelve unrhymed but solidly structured sonnets called “The Little Mommy Sonnets,” allows for odd and unexpected mercies— Some people study…
Reviewed by Judy Swann When my friend tells me this loss will open the way to all the others in my life I think of the way I am drawn (86) So says Wisconsin poet…
Reviewed by Sarah W. Bartlett Poet Laura Foley is not new to publication having won a couple of poetry contests and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of six collections of poetry,…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn It is hard not to feel something of the voyeur when interacting with the short-run chapbook Folie à Quatre. Its high gloss cover offers up a sepia-tint woman in a sheer chemise who appears disinterested or…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Les Fauves, Barbara Crooker gracefully achieves the daunting task of creating ekphrastic poetry that transcends the purely visual. Compact explorations of meditative beauty, the poems highlight Crooker’s remarkable craftsmanship and skill. She is adept…
Review by Grace Gardiner The title of Judy Kronenfeld’s fourth full-length collection Bird Flying through the Banquet alludes to a metaphor for existence posed by the 8th century English monk Saint Bede the Venerable in his Ecclesiastical History of the English…