Review by Lara Lillibridge Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason Jamie Wendt is an award-winning poet, a prolific book reviewer, and a middle school teacher based in Chicago. Her latest collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize…
Review by Kate Lewis With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of…
Review by Rebecca Jane Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that…
Review by Geri Lipschultz Emotionally and thematically resonant, Barbara Henning’s thirteenth book is a slim volume of sixty-nine entries, quasi-biographical and quasi-epistolary in nature. Even the title reflects a quality of compression and intimacy that characterizes these entries:…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s…
Monster Galaxy by Cindy Veach Review by Ruth Hoberman On the cover of Monster Galaxy, Cindy Veach’s new book of poems, Athena glows in gold armor, having sprung powerful and fully formed from her father Zeus’s forehead. The…
Review by Angela Williamson Thoughtfully curated, Commodore Rookery, by Christy Lee Barnes, captures and recasts the first year of parenthood. Through the lens of the rookery, where the speaker goes for inspiration, insight, and wonder, the familiar challenges of…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason I first became familiar with Jennifer Lang’s writing just after she published her first book, Places We Left Behind. It included all the ingredients I enjoy in a memoir: a cross-cultural story, an unusual structure,…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson is smart, sexy, highly relatable book. Lipson’s prose delves into what it means to be a woman, mother, and daughter and had me exclaiming, “Yes! Exactly!”…