Review by Sarah W. Bartlett This chapbook of poetry by award-winning Ellaraine Lockie – her 14th – is immediately unusual in that every poem in the collection has won its own individual contest award. That fact might intimidate…
Review by Emily Webber Even the luckiest people do not manage to get through life unscathed, and yet there are always moments of beauty and grace. The 38 small stories in Jayne Martin’s collection, Tender Cuts, reminds us of…
Review by Carole Mertz Dowd’s literary Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems is as delightful and colorful as the famous avian sketches of the renowned bird watcher. The poet records the lives of Lucy and John James via facts and imaginings, told mainly…
Patrice Boyer Claeys Author’s Note – On Writing The Machinery of Grace At the end of my poetry reading in a downtown Chicago high-rise, one man exclaimed, “We want your next collection to be an all-cento book!” It had happened…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen The past, present and future are melded tightly in Rebecca Pelky’s debut book of poetry, Horizon of the Dog Woman. These poems sing of a traditional Native American philosophy of life. This philosophy encompasses…
Review by Cammy Thomas It took a moment to figure out that in Barbara Ungar’s new book, Save Our Ship, the little dots and dashes in the alphabetical Table of Contents were letters in Morse Code, having to do…
Review by Lara Lillibridge It was only a quirk of zoning that Carol Ann Davis’ son didn’t attend Sandy Hook, which was physically closer to their house. In this collection, written with markers such as “two years before, four years…
Review by Claire Keyes Ghost Dogs is fierce, funny, horrible and yet beautiful in the way O’Reilly’s language transforms the details of a gritty life into striking lyric poems. It’s the tale of a mature woman (one of her…
Review by Anna Limontas-Salisbury Glory to All Fleeting Things reads like a Baptist Church Revival testimony. A testimony in black church vernacular is the story a believer of Jesus tells or testifies about life’s rough times. At the end of…
Review by Emily Webber Maria Giura’s memoir, Celibate, focuses on her decade-long relationship with a Catholic priest and her journey to find her true vocation in life. As a lifelong Catholic myself, one who has wrestled with my faith…