Reviews
Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, Maternity edited by Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve
Review by Laura Dennis In the era of COVID-19, parents find themselves confronting new ways of inhabiting the role of a parent-and. Parent and teacher. Parent and work-from-home employee. Parent and front-line worker. Parent with coronavirus, cut off from…
Let X = X by Cleveland Wall
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson When I asked to review this collection, I’ll admit, I’d forgotten exactly what the phrase, “let X equal something” meant, but I knew it was math. I’ve heard of math-based poetry – could this be…
Asking the Form by Hilary Sallick
Review by Michelle Wilbert A number of years ago, I read a book by noted Quaker author Parker Palmer entitled Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. In it, the following seminal quote: “Before you tell…
Author’s Note – Margo Orlando Littell
Margo Orlando Littell on The Distance from Four Points My Characters’ Trapped-in-Amber Fate When I started writing The Distance from Four Points in 2013, pandemics were something safely tucked away in the world of science fiction or dystopian…
Frozen Charlotte by Susan de Sola
Review by Deborah Leipziger Susan de Sola’s poems are like sea glass arriving on the shore: beautiful, crystalline, and surprising. Her first poem “Bowl of Sea Glass” conveys a tactile joy: The sea’s soft fingers of anemone…
Marjorie Maddox – Author’s Note
Marjorie Maddox On Writing Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises I didn’t plan on publishing a book during a pandemic. You may not have planned on reading it then, either. But, since most of…
The Unexploded Ordnance Bin by Rebecca Foust
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Rebecca Foust’s chapbook The Unexploded Ordnance Bin is timely during a pandemic. The unexploded ordnance bin her son finds on the beach becomes a metaphor for political chaos, neural divergence, and the kind…
Birthdays Before and After by Puma Perl
Review by Tsaurah Litzky Birthdays Before and After, Puma Perl’s fifth solo collection, presents, as the title suggests, a compendium of poems, thirty-eight in all, in which she examines the woof and weave of her life. She…
Sex and Other Slapsticks by Ellaraine Lockie
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett This chapbook of poetry by award-winning Ellaraine Lockie – her 14th – is immediately unusual in that every poem in the collection has won its own individual contest award. That fact might intimidate…
Tender Cuts by Jayne Martin
Review by Emily Webber Even the luckiest people do not manage to get through life unscathed, and yet there are always moments of beauty and grace. The 38 small stories in Jayne Martin’s collection, Tender Cuts, reminds us of…
Audubon’s Sparrow by Juditha Dowd
Review by Carole Mertz Dowd’s literary Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems is as delightful and colorful as the famous avian sketches of the renowned bird watcher. The poet records the lives of Lucy and John James via facts and imaginings, told mainly…
Author’s Note – Patrice Boyer Claeys on Centos
Patrice Boyer Claeys Author’s Note – On Writing The Machinery of Grace At the end of my poetry reading in a downtown Chicago high-rise, one man exclaimed, “We want your next collection to be an all-cento book!” It had happened…