Reviews
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…
Radiation Diaries by Janet Todd
Review by Lara Lillibridge Janet Todd is an academic and novelist, known for her biographies of feminist writers as well as several novels. Todd was born in Wales and grew up in Bermuda, Sri Lanka, England, and Scotland. As…
Flasher by Tsaurah Litzky
Review by Anna Schoenbach Writer, poet, and performer, Tsaurah Litzky is an accomplished author with many chapbooks, erotica, and anthology entries under her belt. A few notable chapbooks of hers include Cleaning the Duck (Bowery Books, 2011), a book…
The Practicing Poet by Diane Lockward
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For many people, the study of poetry is intimidating. Reading and writing poems reminds some of the onerous task they had to surmount in order to graduate from middle school. Thank goodness for clear-eyed…
My Girl’s Green Jacket by Mary Meriam
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson In this, Mary Meriam’s third full-length collection of poetry, dreams are as integral to reality as are expressions of longing, immersion with the preternatural world, and politics surrounding gender identity. Relying largely on a variety…
Fruit of the Earth by Jamie Wendt
Review by Michelle Everett Wilbert In this powerful and exquisite collection of poems, Jamie Wendt, a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA program whose poetry has been published in various literary journals including Lilith, Raleigh Review and Minerva…
Impossibly Small Spaces by Lisa C. Taylor
Review by Bunny Goodjohn The airport monitor indicates George’s flight is on time and I think about what I’ll say to welcome him home. Love isn’t the first word to come to mind, which is, I suppose, progress. (“Salt and…
How to Tell if You Are Human by Jessy Randall
Review by Judy Swann One of the ways people respond to revolution in the arts is to ask, “But what does it mean?” Laurie Anderson, Alison Armstrong-Webber , Miranda July, Lily Gershon, Phillipe Petit, Raymond Queneau, and Gertrude Stein all got asked…
16 Pills by Carley Moore
Review by Lara Lillibridge “I’m a separated, co-parenting mom, a writer and an academic, who tends to struggle between two internal voices…” (8) Carley Moore’s essay collection, 16 Pills, is an exploration on what it means to be a single…