The most perilous part of girlhood is that it ends: on Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood Review by Anna Rollins Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays speaks of topics such as sexual violence, eating disorders, miscarriage, and medical…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Rebecca Jane Incidental Pollen delivers wisdom relating to the experiences of being a nurse, the patients’ courage, and the vistas of grief, spanning verdant mystery to papery decay. These poems bare witness to the degradation of natural…
Review by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice In her most recent and Pulitzer-prize nominated collection, Bone Country, author Linda Nemec Foster takes readers on a breathless tour through Europe and especially her beloved Poland. Yet, these crystalline prose poems are no…
Review by Susan Michele Coronel “What a woman knows, she tells slant,” Alison Stone writes in her ninth book of poems, Informed (New York Quarterly Books, 2024). In this stellar collection, Stone employs a variety of traditional forms…
Review by Melanie McGehee In her latest book, Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell, long-time educator and writer, finally tells her own story. Her prior books celebrate the lives of what might be considered ordinary working people. In them, she…
Review by Christy Lee Barnes In Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, an atheist’s prayers conjure up snakes and possums. Snakes, her deepest fear. And a possum, whose “deep blue / milk, lets her babies / cling…
Review by Lara Lillibridge A good poem is a fleeting emotion captured and held on a page, then released into the heart of the reader to linger. And as women and mothers, we need that pause in our day…
Review by Celia Jeffries “Throughout my journey of motherhood, there have been moments when I wanted to check out. That’s it. I’m done. These were moments when I was sleep-deprived, I was seeing stars behind the actual objects I…
Review by Robbi Nester A first-generation child of immigrants must construct a hyphenated identity, intersection between two different worlds. Judy Kronenfeld’s memoir, Apartness (Inlandia, 2025) takes this process of acculturation as its subject, making the book’s hybrid form, a…
Review by Jeanne Yu Nancy Miller Gomez’s dazzling debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects exposes the unsuspecting inconsolable objects we are born as and those we create in our human path as women and mothers. Gomez challenges boundaries, words push…