Reviews
Camping in the Galaxy by Helen Ruggieri
Reviewed by Janet McCann Haibun is an unusual form, a short prose piece with one or more haiku attached or inserted. It became popular in 17th century Japan, and has a growing number of practitioners here and now. It provides…
Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil
Reviewed by Christine Salvatore We know memory is a passport that never expires. —from “The Hurting Time” What if the day before your wedding the world imploded? What if years later, that marriage unraveled on an ordinary day? Such dichotomies…
Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood
Reviewed by Barbara Ellen Sorensen Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood is a collection of poems, short essays, observations and vignettes that take the reader on an intellectual, yet deeply personal odyssey. A reader of this volume quickly realizes…
50/50 by Julianne Palumbo
Reviewed by Sarah W. Bartlett Founder of Mothers Always Write, an online literary magazine about motherhood, Julianne Palumbo is no stranger to its emotional territory. A prolific poet, essayist, writing coach and mother, she clearly hits her stride when writing…
A Catalogue of Small Pains by Meghan L. Dowling
A Catalogue of Small Pains by Meghan L. Dowling Reviewed by Meghan O’Neill Packaged as a novel, Meghan L. Dowling’s debut A Catalogue of Small Pains unwraps into so much more. A quilted collection of lyrical vignettes, pamphlet excerpts, images…
Throwback Thursdays by Margie Shaheed
Throwback Thursdays by Margie Shaheed Review by Mindy Kronenberg There is something particularly poignant and wistful about reading a posthumous collection of poetry, and, in some cases, a bit startling when reviewing it. Margie Shaheed’s personal and evocative vignettes of…
Perdido by Elaine Terranova
Perdido by Elaine Terranova Review by Judy Swann Perdido, the word itself, is so many things: the title of this book, the title of a poem in this book, a sprightly jazz standard about squandered love, the Spanish adjective for…
Not For Nothing by Kathy Curto
Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood by Kathy Curto Review by Julia Lisella Set in the early 1970s on the south Jersey shore, adult women who came of age in the early 60s still get their hair…
Knitting the Fog by Claudia D. Hernández
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In Knitting the Fog, a poetic accounting of the immigrant experience, the author, as a child, faces daily trials during the three-year absence of a mother illegally making her way to the United States.…
Litany for Wound and Bloom by Judith H. Montgomery
Review by Julie L. Moore Litany for Wound and Bloom, the fourth collection of poems by Oregon Book Award winner Judith H. Montgomery, is like “Another Kind of Prayer” (one of her poem’s titles), as it both raises excruciating questions—“If…
Virginia Woolf In Manhattan by Maggie Gee
Review by Judy Swann There’s almost no book as suited to republishing (in another year, in another format) than Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. First published in 2014, it is Gee’s twelfth novel. In 2012, after her eleventh novel,…
Mary’s River by Barbara Ellen Sorensen
Review by Carole Mertz Sorensen’s Sure Poetic Hand Each section of Sorensen’s well-organized poetry collection bears its gracefully appointed epigraph. (She quotes Eliot, Pound and Kafka). I enjoy reflecting on how her appreciation of these early 20th Century romantics, and…