Review by Rebecca Jane wolves in shells rewilds the experience of reading poetry. This collection achieves narrative justice for battered women, abandoned women, wolves hunted as game, and domestic experience. Here, language repositions spaces we dwell in to alter…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Famished: On food, sex, and growing up as a good girl by Anna Rollins Review by Melanie McGehee In Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, Anna Rollins examines the influences of purity culture and diet…
Review by Tessara Dudley Holli Carrell’s debut collection, Apostasies, is the lyrical diary of an adult reckoning with the aftermath of a girlhood within the Mormon church. Though it is poetry, it draws on a variety of archives and…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg I must confess that I was intrigued by the title of this book when selecting it for review. Not for any perceived sensational contents or promise of provocative odyssey, but its implied cleverness and earnest…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Accidental Devotions is a wonder of a poetry collection, organized in four sections: Scrolling for God, Rebel Angels, Cathedral of Clouds, and Unmistakable Prayers. The final poem is called Necessary Prayer, and it is…
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason Most adults who grew up in the United States remember reading Highlights. Before the digital age, children around the country would peruse Highlights while waiting for a doctor or dentist appointment. The magazine is accessible…
Review by Emily Webber Susan Finch’s collection of loosely interconnected short stories, Dear Second Husband, is set entirely in Nashville. However, what stands out most are the characters—with relationships strained by grief, violence, dissatisfaction, and changing lives. Finch’s keen…
Reflections on At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987-2010 by Lucille Clifton by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie Lucille Clifton always reminds me of things I need to remember. I’ve written often about how when I was a new mother a photo…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Sometimes an Island is a short but mighty novel-in-stories that opens with a prologue and brief history of pogroms against Jews in the Russian empire in the early 1900s. The escape of three young…
Review by Carla Panciera Jane Ward’s fourth book, Should Have Told You Sooner, is both a journey novel and an exercise in time travel. As one of the novel’s youngest characters wisely observes: “‘We tend to think of life…