Reviews
Blood Memory by Gail Newman
Review by Sandra Anfang Gail Newman’s new poetry collection, Blood Memory, is an emotionally challenging and essential reading experience. It chronicles the ongoing effects of the Holocaust on the author and her family across generations. By turns arresting, chilling,…
The More Extravagant Feast by Leah Naomi Green
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth I am reading Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast for the fourth time, as I prepare to enter my fifth month of Covid-induced social distancing. It is especially good to have at this time,…
Author’s Note – Athena Dixon
Athena Dixon On Writing The Incredible Shrinking Woman The Incredible Shrinking Woman opens with an essay, “A Goddess Makes Platanos,” that takes places in the center of chaos and redemption. In the mind of the woman who experienced it,…
The Distance From Four Points by Margo Orlando Littell
Review by Lara Lillibridge Robin’s pretty privileged life comes crashing down after her husband dies, leaving her broke and forced to move back to Four Points, the depressed and decaying town she narrowly escaped by marrying Ray. There were…
Birthmarks by Whitney Rio-Ross
Review by Michelle Wilbert In this debut chapbook of poems by Whitney Rio-Ross—a writer and English teacher living in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee—one is immediately struck by the juxtaposition of sturdy, straightforward language wrapped around familiar stories of…
What is in the Blood by Ellen Stone
Review by Christina Veladota Ellen Stone’s poetry is beautiful and is distressing in its beauty. Winner of the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest for The Solid Living World, Stone has a prolific publishing history in literary journals…
Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity by Artress Bethany White
Review by Laura Dennis “Telling the right story at the right time is one way to open the door for everyone,” writes Artress Bethany White in “Hard-Headed Ike: A Paean to Black Boyhood” (148), the eleventh of thirteen essays…
The Marriage of the Moon and the Field by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Review by Dayna Patterson In Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s stunning debut collection, readers will witness the marriage of moon and field—that glowing, celestial brilliance intermingled with the lowly furrows of dirt, its harrow and plow and dung. In particular, as…
What Shines From It by Sara Rauch
Review by Carla Panciera Sara Rauch’s first collection of stories, Electric Book Award Winner, What Shines From It, begins with an epigraph from an Anne Carson poem, a line of which states that “a wound gives off its own…
Truth Has a Different Shape by Kari L. O’Driscoll
Review by Emily Webber In Kari L. O’Driscoll’s memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape, she assumes the role in her family, even as a young child, as the one to try to keep order and stability. The memoir begins…
The Names of All the Flowers by Melissa Valentine
Review by Lara Lillibridge “This book is for all who have touched this and all who suffer in silent trauma and grief either directly or indirectly. Therefore, this book is for all of us.” (5) Melissa Valentine was born…
Rocked by the Waters, Poems of Motherhood, Margaret Hasse and Athena Kildegaard, Eds.
Review by Ana C.H. Silva The opening epigraph of Rocked by the Waters, Poems of Motherhood, edited by Margaret Hasse and Athena Kildegaard, offers this collection “to everyone rocked by the waters.” Immediately I thought of my post-partum…