An Archival Mothering We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi, Eds. Review by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz For this memoriam, Jordan’s ode begins immediately. At first glance the cover is simply black and white, but a…
Review by Christine Salvatore A good story can thread its way into our lives and not release us until it is told. So it is with the prominent narrative behind Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s newest book, Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press,…
Review by Michelle Everett Wilbert Carol Smallwood’s latest volume of poetry, A Matter of Selection, brings into sharp focus her vivid interest in both the natural world and probing observations of the daily—the quotidian mysteries present in any given life…
Mother Meets World in The Tornado is the World Review by Jennifer Key Catherine Pierce’s newest book The Tornado is the World (Saturnalia Books, 2016) follows her two previous collections The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008),…
Review by Judy Swann These stories are disturbing. They sizzle like hydrogen peroxide on an open wound. They unpack “Other” to a depth never explored before in the American short story (“Others,” as in what Ashis Nandy says, “What…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lara Lillibridge is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. In 2016, she won the Slippery Elm Literary Journals’ Prose Contest and the American Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest.…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In her new book, What Does Not Return, Tami Haaland’s poetry informs the reader that we are all intimately and inextricably tied to the natural world. The recognition of this interdependence is tightly woven…
Review by Ros Howell A recent reviewer of Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty writing in The Guardian online (herself a mother) appeared to reject to one of the central arguments in Rose’s book that “Unless…
Review by Janet McCann This collection is a spooky delight that combines poetic prose pieces with flowing, evocative drawings to give an impression of those who participated in the Salem Witch Trials—not only as they were at the eighteenth century…
Review by Grace Gardiner It might be expected to begin a review of Lesléa Newman’s newest poetry collection Lovely by saying that the poems that comprise this collection are themselves lovely, but this collection seems a poignant, playful, and…