Reviews
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…
If Mother Braids a Waterfall by Dayna Patterson
Review by Deborah Bacharach Dayna Patterson’s first full length poetry collection If Mother Braids a Waterfall is chockfull of Mormons. Their photos grace not just the cover but intersperse with and frame the poems throughout the book. (And…
Author’s Note: Hilary Sallick on Asking the Form
Asking the Form / After Words by Hilary Sallick A small regret is that I didn’t include the dates of publication along with the acknowledgments of those journals that published some of the poems in Asking the Form.…
Taking Care of Time by Cortney Davis
Review by Anna Limontas-Salisbury When nurses around the world began to make urgent pleas for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the fight against Covid-19, it was as though no one knew that nursing could be dangerous. Why become a…
Poet Duet by Florence Adams Clark and Carolyn Clark
Poet Duet: A Mother and Daughter Poetry Manuscript Review by Mindy Kronenberg In a previous review of Carolyn Clark’s New Found Land, I stated that the collection read as “…an epic of life’s discoveries and detours, the shared excursions…
Some Glad Morning by Barbara Crooker
Review by Julia Lisella Some Glad Morning is Barbara Crooker’s ninth collection of poems. Since her debut collection, Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award, Crooker’s work has insisted on the lyrical promise of the everyday…
Rue: Poems by Katherine Nuernberger
Review by Christine Salvatore Reading a poem from Katherine Nuernberger’s new collection is like listening to a friend tell a fascinating story, taking few breaths while she lets one inevitable detail bleed into the next; to hang on, lean…
Hitchcock Blonde by Sharon Dolin
Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir by Sharon Dolin Review by Kelly Bargabos Reading Sharon Dolin’s memoir, Hitchcock Blonde, is like sitting in a theater next to the author as she watches a movie reel of her own life, and…
Keep This to Yourself by Kerrin McCadden
Review by Carla Panciera By the time Kerrin McCadden’s brother dies of an overdose, she has already rehearsed his death: “There he goes again,” she writes in Keep This to Yourself, a searing collection that examines both the profound…
Prime Meridian by Connie Post
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Connie Post’s Prime Meridian, I lost count of how many times she used the words “falling” and “broken.” In the poet’s world everything is tenuous. Everything is breaking or about to break, is…
Before the Fevered Snow by Megan Merchant
Review by Sherre Vernon Megan Merchant is an editor at Pirene’s Fountain and The Comstock Review and holds an MFA from UNLV and is the author Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2017), Grief Flowers (2018) and Before…