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Book Review :: Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer

Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Certain Shelter, Abbie Kiefer sensitively examines how personal and communal loss shape identity, focusing on a woman balancing responsibilities to her children and aging parents. The collection is a tribute to her late mother and reflects on the fading industries in Gardiner, Maine. Kiefer explores transitions from being cared for to caring for others and the granting of autonomy to her sons, alongside pivotal moments in her hometown, such as “My Friend Tells Me About the Last Day at the Bass Shoe Factory.”

As Kiefer examines the “human weight” of loss, weaving together her grief with the collective “sorrow” of her community, she is always “tender / toward relics—” She reveals vulnerability as she “Gently / attests to the nature / of contrast—” Her skill lies in expressing the entwined grief and joy of life, especially after loss. In “I’m So Tired,” she writes: “I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy / and the garden.”

Continuing her exploration of shared experience, Kiefer’s poems celebrate Yankee heritage and are “concerned with the ordinary” people whose labor and artisanry are often unnoticed and underappreciated. “In Praise of Minor,” Kiefer salutes minor poets “faithful to work that will meet / with quiet,” suggesting kinship with notable yet underrecognized Maine poet Edward Arlington Robinson. If Robinson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is considered a minor poet, it invites reflection on the value of all voices in poetry. Kiefer highlights this idea in her six-section prose poem, “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine.” This poem addresses things that “falter against change” — the town that loses the paper mill and train station, residents who “abide in spareness,” and Robinson himself, who moved away from Gardiner. “But in his poems, he returns and returns.”

Ultimately, parts “hymn” and “wild shards,” Abbie Kiefer’s narrative-lyric poems will endure because “Ground that shakes / can also shelter.” And that’s the truth of this beautiful, tender-hearted debut.

Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer. June Road Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: What Good is Heaven by Raye Hendrix

What Good is Heaven by Raye Hendrix book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The poems of Raye Hendrix’s What Good is Heaven are rooted in the farmlands and mountains of North Alabama. They portray the complexities of southern agrarian life, foregrounding both its religious fervor and violent undertones. We experience the bloodletting and the beauty of this place and people through a transgressive character who makes sense of the idyllic vision of pastoral life and the heavy burden of religious oppression.

Hendrix’s moody poems draw from the Southern Gothic tradition and stand out for their use of “sparkling dark” oxymorons: “unowned and belonging,” faithful and forbidden, and “violence / cloaked in an oath of care.” As Hendrix writes the tensions and aberrations of southern life, they neither judge the contradictions nor express melancholy. These are not poems of guilt and capitulation. They are clear-eyed and delivered by someone who has known who they are from a young age and is not afraid to express their will: “The first time I was reborn // I told my mother I wanted / to love a woman.”

Hendrix uses the narrative-lyric mode to tell their queer coming-of-age story within their “Southern stoic” family who “worked the earth” and attended church. Through the poems, we learn that Hendrix survived the Bible and the belt, a grandmother who “pushed my head through the drywall / for being a little dyke,” and conversion therapy. But these poems do not succumb to shame or revenge. Instead, they muck in reality’s fallibility and mercy.

The poems reflect on past formative events, reaching us after a period of reflection. While this may diminish some of their emotional charge, it allows for a more significant poetic quality: understatement. The poems are not dramatic but, like the poet’s people, stoic. Both spare and sparing, the poems are written by someone already free. Hendrix has the power and wields it to create a meticulously crafted, visceral, and vibrant debut.

What Good is Heaven by Raye Hendrix. Texas Review Press: The University Press of San Houston State University, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: Girl in a Bear Suit by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

Girl in a Bear Suit by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s debut poetry collection, Girl in a Bear Suit, delves into the intricacies of womanhood, victimhood, and the power dynamics ingrained in both mythology and society.

Chosen by Christopher Citro as the winner of the 23rd Annual Elixir Press Poetry Award, this collection draws on the haunting tale of Callisto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poems link transformations to violence, gender, power, punishment, or escape.

Jabaily-Blackburn engages in a modern discussion about the cautionary tales that have historically ensnared girls and women. These warnings, often laced with control and fear, aim to restrict female freedom and autonomy. She examines the circumstances that lead women and girls to become hyper-aware of their surroundings and barraged by warnings — “Do not wear! Do not consume! / Do not go!” Each poem is a “space” where Callisto and other female voices emerge “poised / to speak,” ready to assert their existence.

In a world that often views femininity through a lens of caution and threat, Jabaily-Blackburn highlights the longing for agency. Lines such as “Myths have always made / witches of us / when we refused to bend” underscore the collection’s incisive critique of patriarchal structures and the urgent need for redefining narratives.

The poet’s sharp wit, natural humor, and inventive style propel readers through a whirlwind of emotion, capturing the journey from silence to the liberation of voice. Vivid phrases like “a flip book of Excitement sprinting / spine to edge” capture the exhilarating process of reclaiming one’s story despite societal constraints.

Girl in a Bear Suit compels us to rethink the stories we inherit and share, reshaping our perspective on the female experience. By amplifying the often-muted voices of women and girls, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn enriches our understanding of the complex narratives around gender and survival today. This striking debut is essential to the conversation.

Girl in a Bear Suit by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn. Elixir Press, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: The Payback by Kashana Cauley

The Payback by Kashana Cauley book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Payback, Kashana Cauley’s second novel is a combination of social satire and a heist novel, with a hefty dose of dark comedy. Jada begins the novel working at a clothing store in the mall, having lost her job as a costume designer in the film industry over what she refers to as the Incident in the early part of the work. However, she is unable to keep that job due to her penchant for theft that she has been unable to overcome. She ends up living with Lanae and hanging out with Audrey, both of whom work in the same store, after the debt police take everything she owns, which wasn’t much to begin with.

The debt police play an important role in the novel, as they find people who still owe on their student loans and encourage them to pay, largely by beating them up or, as in Jada’s case, beating her up and taking what she owns, even though those possessions will barely affect their overall debt burden. This aspect of the novel is Cauley’s sharpest satire, as the victims are exclusively Black women, who are the most likely to have significant student load debt. Bystanders either ignore the beatings or even heap verbal abuse on the women. Jada, Audrey, and Lanae all commiserate about their situation, talking about the promises schools and society made that led them to take out loans for higher education.

They end up making a plan to try to erase all of the government student loan debt by uploading a virus to their servers, then breaking in to remove the hard drive that serves as a backup. Given that the novel is clearly comic, one can expect everything to work out, one way or another, but the core of the novel is the satire of a society that vilifies people for taking on debt, while also saying that the only way to succeed is through a college degree.

The Payback by Kashana Cauley. Atria Books, July 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Now We Are Here: Family, Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life by Gabrielle Oliveira

Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life by Gabrielle Oliveira book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Gabrielle Oliveira’s latest book, Now We Are Here, delves into the lives of 16 newly-arrived immigrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and covers their first three years in the US, 2018-2021. All of these families – 30 kids under 18 and 24 parents – experienced weeks-to-month-long separations after requesting asylum at the border. Although all of the people profiled were eventually reunited and allowed to settle in the country, the long-term damage of their often-traumatic journey – and the subsequent rupture caused by their incarceration – is evident, especially in the children Oliveira introduces.

Indeed, hundreds of hours of interviews reveal that the children desperately wanted to talk to their teachers and peers about what they’d been through since leaving their homelands. Unfortunately, this was discouraged. Instead, Oliveira tracks how the kids’ attempts to talk about their experiences were repeatedly shut down by teachers in what Oliveira calls “the pedagogy of silence.”

“Children often encountered adults who stifled their narratives, changed the subject, or decided that this type of political knowledge could be dangerous or complicated to discuss in the classroom…Educators were not actively seeking to hurt or ignore children. More than anything, teachers wanted their students to feel supported in the present moment and understand that they were now safe.”

But the kids knew better and expressed a deep longing to share their fears and worries with other newcomers. For their part, most parents also wanted to avoid rehashing the past, suppressing discussion of past atrocities in favor of adjusting to new realities. At the same time, most simultaneously questioned their decision to migrate and wondered if uprooting their families had been a mistake.

Now We Are Here is an intensely moving book. And while it barely touches the surface of the current administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, it is nonetheless essential reading for educators and those working with Central American immigrants.

Now We Are Here: Family, Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life by Gabrielle Oliveira. Stanford University Press, November 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Abbreviate, Sarah Fawn Montgomery skillfully examines the myriad ways girls are conditioned to “shrink smaller” so boys can “get bigger.” Through interconnected lyric micro-essays, she reflects on how small, often overlooked or downplayed experiences accumulate into a multilayered life-narrative of diminishment that demonstrates what girls face in various environments, including homes, schools, literature, and video games. Montgomery sensitively and candidly addresses domestic violence, casual intimidation, and sexual assault, revealing the double standards and dismissive attitudes that permeate these spaces.

Starting from middle school and continuing to college, Montgomery illustrates the pervasive nature of misogyny, particularly within educational settings. Both male and female authority figures perpetuate pressures to conform and perform that lead girls to harm themselves, as they struggle with unrealistic standards for their bodies. The title essay places this theme in sharp relief.

In “Abbreviate,” Montgomery uses the situation of female students sharing the same name — “we Sarahs are too many” — to illustrate how girls are forced to adapt for the convenience of their teachers: “When our names are … replaced with a letter, we become small like our bodies, a period at the end to signal that the decision is not ours.”

Despite the awful predicament of this “endless cycle,” some essays celebrate the “small miracles” of female friendship: A refuge where girls can “tend to what haunted” and “heal hurts no one would see or believe.” The saving support of aunts, sisters, and friends helps shift their focus from looking down to “up at the stars.”

By speaking out to “constellate our collective hurts,” girls can escape oppression and reclaim their stories as “someone seen … someone believed.” As Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essays navigate the patriarchal landscape particular to American culture, a woman emerges with “Strength newly summoned,” understanding herself and her place in the world. Abbreviate is a necessary and resonant book.

Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery. Small Harbor Publishing, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: Don’t Call It a Comeback by Keira D’Amato

Don’t Call It a Comeback by Keira D’Amato book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Most people would think Keria D’Amato’s story is only for runners, as she is one of the elite female runners competing today. However, her new book goes beyond providing inspiration for those who run, as it’s a story about finding joy in what one loves, whether that’s running or any other vocation or avocation one might have.

D’Amato’s story seems counterintuitive. She was a strong runner when she was younger, but she struggled with injuries in her twenties, leading her to leave competitive running. She went about creating a life, as she started a business, got married, and had children. However, in her thirties, when many competitive runners are ending their careers, she accidentally began hers again. She was feeling overwhelmed by raising two children, often by herself, as her husband was in the military and was deployed for long periods of time, so she went for a run, not even making it three minutes.

However, during that short run, she began to find herself again, so she went back out again and again, slowly building back up in mileage and speed, while also gaining confidence and happiness. She began entering races and winning them, or at least exceeding her expectations, until she started running times that put her into the elite status where she now resides. Along the way, she finds community and joy, which are more important to her than any records she sets or races she wins. That’s what keeps her coming back to running, and it’s what she wants to impart to her readers more than any running advice one could imagine.

Don’t Call It a Comeback by Keira D’Amato, with Evelyn Spence. St. Martin’s Press, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian

Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Though published a couple of years ago now, Quinn Slobodian’s exploration of economic zones that ignore — and even suppress — democratic freedoms is as relevant today as when it was published. In fact, she uses a quote from Stephen Moore, one of President Trump’s chief economic advisors during his first term in office, in which he says, “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I’m not even a big believer in democracy.” That theme runs throughout Slobodian’s book, as he delves into eleven different areas (though the final one is actually virtual) where people have formed economic zones that put capitalism well above democracy.

Slobodian begins in Hong Kong, which serves as the template for many of the areas that follow, including Singapore, Liechtenstein, Somalia, Dubai, and Silicon Valley. In each case, a person or people connect with leaders of those areas to try to establish zones where the rules and laws of democracy cease to exist, especially workers’ rights. They typically develop quickly and become safe havens for billionaires to invest or hide their money or for companies to produce products without safety or workplace guidelines. While they have short-term success, they often don’t last.

Lest people think a book on economic zones is beyond the comprehension of the lay reader, let me assure them that Slobodian’s clear prose and explanations help anybody with a basic understanding of capitalism and democracy understand what a particular group of thinkers are trying to do. Once readers understand, most will be aghast at the ways in which capitalism often trumps democracy, even in countries that purport to value democratic values above all else. For that reason alone, this book is as much of today as any others being written.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian. Metropolitan Books, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley

Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Writer-parent-college professor-activist Madeline Lane-McKinley’s latest book, Solidarity with Children, is at its most powerful when delineating the many ways the world ignores the needs of young people: allowing them to be unhoused and go hungry, deporting them and their caretakers, incarcerating their loved ones, subjecting them to the school-to-prison pipeline as well as the brutalities of war, and often disbelieving their accounts of abuse and neglect. Moreover, top-down, test-driven schooling overlooks their strengths and proclivities, and instead prioritizes rote learning over creativity. Add in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, climate change, and rising authoritarianism, and it’s clear that the kids politicians describe as “our future” are in dire straits.

Solidarity with Children is a plea for change. But while the account nods to differing conceptions of childhood in different eras, its overarching argument — that adults and children must be allies and collaborators in remaking the world — the book does not adequately address the fact that adults, whether they are biologically connected to the children in their lives and communities or not, need to play a decisive role in educating and guiding them from childhood into adulthood.

Of course, children should be listened to, taken seriously, and respected, but relationships between adults and kids nonetheless require the establishment of boundaries and the loud and sometimes forceful use of the word ‘No.’ They also require trust. Still, in dreaming big, Solidarity with Children projects ways for adults and children to work together to promote liberatory education, healthier families, and open communications. It’s a robust conversation starter.

Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley. Haymarket Books, November 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: ENTWINE by Mary Newell

ENTWINE by Mary Newell book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Mary Newell’s ENTWINE is a reverent exploration of the “intermix of life” and “Verdant worlds” surrounding her home in the Hudson Highlands. Similar to Thoreau’s Walden, Newell’s collection is an “anthropocentric lament,” advocating for living deliberately and attentively within one’s environment.

With a lyrical and contemplative voice, Newell “summons” readers to wander through pollinator gardens and woodlands around her home. Weaving description and devotion, she aims to “tangle” the human experience with the lives of trees, plants, and animals so all are “respiring together.” Her “alert” poems “throb” with imagery that honors the relationships she forges with her natural neighbors: birch, salvia, red-tailed hawks, and ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Instead of making assumptions, Newell respectfully asks: “Totem oak, may I call you kin, care for your wounds?” Of course, the tree does not answer. But that is not the point. Much like a spiritual seeker conversing with the divine, the poet poses poignant questions about her connectedness to the world around her and accepts “adjacency, … / an honorable relation, no harm, some help.”

The collection’s use of “nuzzled wording” and hyphenated language effectively illustrates the concept of a shared “dwelling-spot.” The poet employs various forms to express her “lifepulse.” These include botanical acrostics, left-justified columns, and prose poems. Most of all, it is the lyric “Dispersals,” which scatters words across the pages like the flowers Newell describes, that enacts the wild, exuberant spirit of nature itself.

Ultimately, ENTWINE is a “heart proximal” almanac, celebrating the intertwined “luminous” existence of all life. Mary Newell’s writing embodies a desire for “one-to-one acknowledgment.” She invites readers to cultivate their own “tone-shape harmonies” with the environment and reflect on the marvel of coexistence: “Let rock be rock and water be water, / as each yields to the other.”

ENTWINE by Mary Newell. BlazeVOX [books], January 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper

even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Irene Cooper’s even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety draws inspiration from Leonora Carrington, adopting the attitude of a surrealist and revolutionary to explore realms of the psyche and tensions between form and content, humor and critique, identity and the socio-political landscape.

The collection consists of six sections, each framed by a psychological term that guides the exploration of its subjects. The first section, “shadows, or structured observation,” presents twelve concrete poems that bolster or subvert the relationship between form and content. Cooper is “deliberate” in her “contraindications.” With “sardonicism as a / brand of humor,” Cooper also critiques institutional structures that perpetuate “senators who abandon,” “abuse of power,” and “misogyny.”

As the collection transitions into exploring “personal unconscious” and the Jewish diaspora, Cooper shares portraits of “great aunt helen,” “aunt chickee’s / ellis / island / ankles,” and a “soldier | medic.” The soldier’s “story” takes form in a “sonnet tiara,” Cooper’s feminist response to a “sonnet crown.”

The third section, focusing on the “collective unconscious,” follows this turn toward shared identity, observing diverse characters — a female driver in an accident, an “irish citizen,” a “toothy love man” on the street, airplane passenger “leo,” and a bartender — “jambed tight against” the poet’s consciousness.

After exploring the collective, the section on “attachment theory” shifts to themes of poetry and sexuality, utilizing the cinquain form and text boxes to probe creative forces. The fifth section, “the strange situation test,” features poems that consider the risks associated with speech and resistance “tendered against the winded heart.” Lastly, “death, or the visual cliff” invites contemplation of “eco-logic” and “uncrushed / species,” challenging readers to consider what “posterity measures.”

Writing her way “in the darkness / if not through it,” Irene Cooper explores the familial, psychological, and structural forces that shape our lives and the interconnectedness of our stories in a world where anxiety lingers like a shadow.

even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper. Airlie Press, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

There’s no way to read Claire Lombardo’s second novel without having the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” running through one’s head, and it’s clear she means for the reader to do so. The reader follows Julia through three significant periods in her life — her childhood, especially her teenage years; the first years with her son, Ben; Ben’s marriage to Sunny — though the novel doesn’t move chronologically through her life. Julia is wondering, as David Byrne sang, “Well, how did I get here?” The reader not only asks that question, but also where and how Julia will end up.

While I was disappointed with the answer to those questions, as the ending felt too pat, too untrue to the messiness of life, Lombardo crafts Julia’s life — as well as the lives of those around her — so clearly that I cared about the answer throughout most of the novel. Julia and Mark’s marriage seems in danger of ending not once, but several times; Julia has a strained relationship with her mother, for good reasons; Julia is surprised (and not in a positive manner) by Ben’s announcement that he and Sunny are having a child and getting married; Julia struggles in dealing with her teenage daughter, Alma, who is dealing with the college admissions process.

The novel is clear-eyed about the problems in all of those relationships, in addition to some others, which is where the characters live and breathe. Life is found in the struggles, as well as the moments of joy, especially in the quotidian nature of life, which is, as the title reminds readers, the “same as it ever was.” I enjoyed spending time with these characters, not because they were perfect, but because they felt real. And that’s a good way to let the days go by, at least once in a lifetime.

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo. Doubleday, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth by Chandler Patton Miranda

Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth by Chandler Patton Miranda, with an afterword by Carola Suárez-Orozco book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

When the 2025-2026 school year kicked off in September, 411,549 public school teaching positions were either unfilled or staffed by an instructor who was uncertified in the subject they’d been assigned to teach. This year alone, more than six million K-12 students – many of them newly arrived immigrants from every corner of the globe – will be impacted. Chandler Patton Miranda’s Sanctuary School not only decries this, but zeroes in on an alternative model of inclusive, welcoming education: A 31-school national consortium called the Internationals Network for Public Schools.

In order to write the book, Patton Miranda spent years at one facility in the Network, International High School (IHS) in New York City, as a participant-observer. She also interviewed dozens of IHS students, staff, teachers, administrators, parents, and alumni. The result is a comprehensive ethnography of an innovative, collaborative, and politically and socially engaged program.

The book introduces an array of instructors, many of whom are themselves immigrants, who are well-equipped with the skills necessary to work with newcomers. Their ability to empathize with their students is exemplary. Furthermore, Patton Miranda describes the faculty as willing to take risks, make mistakes, and constantly adapt the curriculum to meet evolving student needs. Collegiality and open communication, she reports, are woven into the school’s DNA.

Moreover, Sanctuary School details the ways that IHS, like other Network programs, is tailored to meet the individual political, legal, academic, and material needs of the diverse students who enroll. In addition, the faculty’s refusal to fast-track English-language acquisition or “teach to the test” means that the school sidesteps standardized evaluation and instead prioritizes experiential learning and students’ social and emotional well-being over grades and task completion. Similarly, IHS staff members are encouraged to work together and weigh in on all school governance decisions.

These factors make IHS and the Network schools covered by Sanctuary School both inspiring and impressive. It’s a wonderful, empowering read.

Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth by Chandler Patton Miranda with and afterword by Carola Suarez-Orozco. Harvard Education Press, October 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S. by Caitlin Cass

Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S. by Caitlin Cass book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Suffrage Song, Caitlin Cass’s Eisner-winning graphic history, delves into voting rights in the U.S., as her subtitle indicates. The reference to that past being haunted comes from two places. First, history has ignored many of the women in this book — effectively turning them into ghosts — and, second, the women most readers will have heard of made significant compromises in order to enable white women to get the right to vote.

The book highlights women (and a few men) most people are unfamiliar with, such as Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (a Chinese American woman who fought for the right to vote, even though she wasn’t allowed to be a citizen), Frances Watkins Harper (she essentially advocated for what we would now call intersectional feminism), and Sue White (best known for burning President Wilson in effigy at the White House Gates), to name a few. Cass resurrects these ghosts to remind readers of how wide and diverse the suffragist movement actually was.

However, she also points out the contradictions and hypocrisy of many of the leaders of the movement, as white women and men quite often turned their backs on those who worked with them in the abolitionist and suffragist movement, almost always over the question of race. Leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt were willing to trade away the pursuit of universal suffrage for the less ambitious goal of the right to vote for white women. Cass, though, also includes those activists who weren’t willing to make that trade, again reminding readers of the diversity of thought within the movement.

Cass ends with an epilogue that brings voting rights to the present day, pointing out that there are still a variety of approaches some politicians use to try to disenfranchise voters. She draws strength from the women of the past and is optimistic about the future, as she refuses to give into hopelessness, even as she knows there’s still work to be done. Some might view such an outlook as naïve, but her faith in historical progress thought continued activism might be what we need right now.

Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S. by Caitlin Cass. Fantagraphics, June 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Many people complain that books set in the LGBTQ+ community focus only on the suffering, a complaint that gets leveled at most books by and about minorities, actually. Eloghosa Osunde’s novel doesn’t take that approach at all. As Akin, a musician, says near the end of the book, “Sometimes everything is tall and scary. It’s valid, and true, and very difficult to live with, but fear doesn’t get to decide for us. We get the last say on what we think is worth the risk. I think love is. I think care is.” This novel is about love and care among a group of friends who make meaningful lives out of some difficult circumstances.

Osunde helpfully provides a cast of characters at the beginning of the novel, as each section focuses on different relationships, both romantic and familial (though the familial is often in connection to the romantic, as some parents are accepting, while others aren’t). There are at least six different romantic relationships, and Osunde often provides back stories for each of those characters, especially when they involve parents who shape their children, for good and ill. While Nigeria outlaws same-sex relationships, Osunde’s characters don’t concern themselves with laws, as they’re more focused on finding family, whether with their biological ones or their found ones.

The novel concludes with a party, primarily to celebrate Maro and Jekwe’s wedding, along with Akin’s album release, but there is a sad undertone, given that people will probably be going in different directions after it’s over. However, just before the novel concludes, Awele, a writer, makes notes for what could be the beginning of an essay, in which she writes about the people she has formed a community with: “You taught me that wounds are not the only things we can respond to.” These characters find themselves through dealing with some wounds, but they have mostly shaped themselves and one another through love and care, which is the real cause for celebration.

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde. Riverhead Books, July 2025.

Book Review :: The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr

The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The titular boy from the sea in Garrett Carr’s first novel for adults literally arrives from the sea, washing up in half of a blue barrel on the shores of the fishing village of Donegal. The town embraces him, passing him from one family to another for a brief period of time, until Ambrose and Christine take him into their house. Their two-year-old son Declan makes it clear even then that he doesn’t accept Brendan — the name Ambrose and Christine give their new son — as his brother, an assertion he makes for the rest of his childhood.

Donegal becomes a character in and of itself, as Carr uses a first person plural narrator at times to show how the town is changing through Brendan’s life, changes that impact Ambrose and his family. In fact, Carr often uses the phrase “the season turned” before summing up changes in the village to reflect broader shifts outside of Brendan and his family’s life. When Brendan first arrives, Ambrose’s fishing helps them begin to move up economically, but Ambrose falls behind the shift to more industrial fishing, a shift that changes his interactions with his family and friends. Carr sets the novel in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when Ireland’s economy began contracting significantly, leading to many people leaving the country, a theme that comes up throughout the novel.

Both Brendan and Declan struggle to find their place in the village. Brendan has a period of success giving secular blessings to people during the economic downturn, while Declan discovers a talent for and joy in cooking that almost nobody notices or appreciates. Christine drifts away from her father and sister, who live next door, but reconnects with them, at times. Throughout the novel, the characters and town experience tragedies, but still find moments of joy and connection, much as we all do in life.

The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr. Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: the artemisia by William S. Barnes

the artemesia by William S. Barnes book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In the artemisia, national winner of the 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, poet and botanist William S. Barnes presents ecstatic love poems in the tradition of Sappho and Rumi. Like his predecessors, Barnes’s poems “sit in the light between” elegy and ode, expressing passionate love and desire. They honor the emotional experiences and “wild abundance” of mortal life, drawing “out from within” an upward reaching “sweetest song.”

In addition to lyric poetry, the domains of the artemisia are mythic, folkloric, and botanical. Artemisia refers to a hardy shrub known for its digestive benefits. In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister. She is the goddess of the moon and nature.

Barnes’s ode pays tribute to plants’ “brilliant canopies of leaves” and “chromatic range of green.” His elegy memorializes a “soulfriend.” Excerpts from her letters are interwoven with his lines to create a living dialogue. In these ways, the poems undulate between the “persistence” and “decay” of life: “I’m cut in two and all the leaves are coming out.”

Regardless of what “is nurtured,” whether “laughing or leaving,” every poem a “rising to meet” and “invite you in.” Barnes’s poems welcome us, hold our hands, and teach us. In “the veils (viola adunca),” the poet offers a plantsman’s “truth” as he describes the five-petaled dog violet:

“difficult to press. it is not possible to see the whole

without cutting. and this would make it something else.
the listener must infer what cannot be said.”

While acknowledging the challenge of conveying the deepest human emotions and truths in language, Barnes makes space for the mystery in words and expression, naming “themselves again” for us. The “leaning into” poems of William S. Barnes’s second collection are “evanescent” in their language and in their representation of life’s “pathway” as it “bends into the hills, across the contour, rising.”

the artemisia by William S. Barnes. Inlandia Institute, April 2024.

Book Review :: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The term “safekeep” has echoes of keeping something safe for somebody else, as if a person is holding onto something precious for that somebody. In Yael van der Wouden’s debut, Orange-Prize-winning novel, The Safekeep, it first appears that Isabel is keeping herself safe from the world, though it’s not exactly clear as to why. She has isolated herself in the house where their Dutch family moved during World War II. Their father had died, so their uncle helped them find this house outside Zwolle, to try to keep them safe. Isabel still lives there, more than a decade later, after her mother has died, and her two brothers live in the city.

She has isolated herself from her brothers, as well, as she doesn’t approve of either of their lifestyles. Louis dates one woman after another, yet he is unwilling or unable to commit to any of them for very long. If he does get married, though, the house becomes his, as their Uncle Karel believes he should have it to raise a family. Hendrik is in a long-time relationship with Sebastian, a relationship that 1960s Dutch society doesn’t approve of, though it seems Isabel is also upset at Hendrik for leaving her and the house.

Louis begins dating Eva, whom Isabel clearly dislikes, but his work requires him to go out of town for several weeks, and Eva suggests that she could live with Isabel during this time. Their few weeks together change Isabel’s life, as Eva’s presence first presents her with a realization of who she has always been but could never admit to herself, then leads to an epiphany about the Netherlands and the world, which Isabel has long suppressed.

In this outstanding first novel, Yael van der Wouden raises questions about the ways in which people deny truths about themselves, but also about how people tamp down unpleasant truths about countries and the world. She also provides hope that, if one person can admit to realities they’ve suppressed, perhaps more of us can, as well.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. Avid Reader Press, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy’s newest novel, creates Shearwater, an island not far off the coast of Antarctica (based on Macquarie Island, she says in a note at the end), where a family of four lives in a lighthouse. There’s a seed vault there, which they’re supposed to load up and take on a ship which will arrive in six weeks, as the sea will soon engulf the island. While there’s no clear date as to when the novel takes place, the world outside seems to be even more ravaged by climate change than our current world, a reality that serves as the backdrop for everything that happens.

There are ghosts haunting this island, whether the death of the mother of the three children or the violent history of the island, as men used it as a place to hunt whales, club seals, and kill penguins, almost to extinction. The father, Dominic, is haunted by his wife’s death, and his children often overhear him talking to her. Fen, the daughter, is so frightened of something, she sleeps in a boathouse or on the shore of the sea. Raff, the oldest son, has a violent temper, which his father tries to channel into punching a makeshift boxing bag in the top of the lighthouse. The youngest son, Orly, is obsessed with the seeds and can list information and facts about many that most people have never heard of.

The family seems to be functioning, even after the researchers have left, until a woman washes onto the shore. Rowan’s appearance is mysterious, as there shouldn’t be any ship in the area, so the family tries to understand her while she asks questions about the situation there. The mysteries that underlie all five of these characters drive the tension in this novel, as they move from mistrust to building a type of family, which the truth threatens to undercut. In the same way that all of the characters in this novel must face the realities of their lives, McConaghy wants the readers to own up to the realities of climate change. In each case, characters and readers will need to change their approach to the world to have any chance of survival.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Flatiron Books, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Kids on Earth: The Learning Potential of 5 Billion Minds by Howard Blumenthal & Robert C. Pianta

Kids on Earth: The Learning Potential of 5 Billion Minds by Howard Blumenthal and Robert C. Pianta book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Over the next 25 years, 5 billion kids worldwide will enroll in primary and secondary schools. These kids will need an education that meets 21st-century challenges, but most programs, Blumenthal and Pianta write, rely on a one-size-fits-all model that assumes that every child can learn the same material in the same top-down way. It isn’t true. “Learning should invite discovery, exploration, and risk-taking,” they write, and should be “personal, relational, and active.”

Retention suffers when this doesn’t happen. According to research and interviews conducted by the authors in more than 70 countries, when a student is academically disinterested, “one-third of the info presented to them is lost within 15 to 20 minutes; half is lost within the first hour, and three-quarters is lost within a day.” After a month, four-fifths is gone. Students may pass a test — hell, they may even get an A — but unless the coursework taps into their curiosity and allows them to investigate, probe, and connect with others, their engagement will likely be stifled and temporary.

But change is possible: Since today’s students are the first generation to be globally connected, Blumenthal and Pianta see endless potential for cross-cultural collaboration, with children, teens, and young adults working together to pursue scientific discoveries and find solutions to poverty, hunger, environmental calamity, and other pressing social issues. It’s an optimistic, if perhaps pie-in-the-sky, assessment.

The book does not tackle political repression, the massive influence of AI, the school privatization movement, or the necessity of teacher buy-in; nonetheless, Kids on Earth is a provocative conversation starter, relevant for everyone who wants to help kids develop the foundational skills they’ll need — including reading, writing, and basic arithmetic — to kickstart their creativity and stoke their passions.

As a roadmap for lifelong learning, the book serves as an antidote to staid scholarship. Provocative and likely to stir debate, the text asks important questions and offers bold suggestions for making education meaningful for future generations.

Kids on Earth: The Learning Potential of 5 Billion Minds by Howard Blumenthal and Robert C. Pianta. Harvard Education Press, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In her collection of essays, I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman doesn’t hide her purpose, stating in the introduction that she has moved further to the political left, and each of these essays ties to that idea in some way. However, rather than writing ideological jeremiads, she uses her personal experiences and her reading of culture to show the problems with America’s move to the right and how a move to the left would be more humane and beneficial.

In “Copaganda and Me,” for example, she writes about the television shows and movies she and her brothers watched when she was younger: Miami Vice, CHiPs, and Police Academy. She excavates what that media taught them about the police and their relationship to the public, contrasting that portrayal with what her experiences in life, such as “stop-and-frisk” laws in New York and George Floyd’s murder, have shown her. Her two brothers become police officers, while she moves in the other direction, protesting police actions; she loves her brothers, but she’s unable to talk to them about politics.

Kreizman circles back to healthcare in several essays, such as the first essay “She’s Lost Control Again” and “I Found My Life Partner (and My Health Insurance) Because I Got Lucky.” In that first essay, she talks about her struggles with Type 1 Diabetes. While she spends significant time talking about trying to keep her blood glucose numbers where they should be, that leads her into an exploration of insulin costs and the ways the healthcare system fails people. In the latter essay, she focuses on healthcare more directly, arguing that nobody should have to rely on luck or marriage to have healthcare, an idea she complicates by pointing out that she’s reliant on her husband for it, taking away some of her freedom/independence.

The weaving of the personal and political works well to remind readers that those two are always cojoined, no matter what politicians argue. She shows readers again and again that policies affect people’s day-to-day real lives because they affect her real life, as they do all of ours. Such an approach is more convincing and more moving than another political screed, so one hopes readers will take note of the effects that political actions have on Kreizman and so many more.

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman. Ecco, July 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: If I Had Said Beauty by Tami Haaland

'If I Had Said Beauty' by Tami Haaland poetry book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her fourth collection of poetry, If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland honors “known and unknown” ancestors and searches for herself within “The lines leading to this body.” In “Prelude,” the first poem, we learn the poet’s heritage is “mostly Scandinavian, then / British, Irish, German.” Haaland is as interested in “the traits of women and men who / have made me” as she is in the “lines… deeper.”

Her investigation of her people’s “migrations, / and landings,” “their stories, their histories” is geographical, genealogical, “mitochondrial,” psychological, and spiritual. Throughout the collection, the poet poses age-old philosophical and evolutionary questions about who we are and who we “want to be.”

The unstructured sonnet, contrapuntal, palindrome, and prose poem “give form, proportion” to Haaland’s inquiry. Each form provides either a “flip side,” doubling possible inheritances, or a “line between here / and not here,” bordering possible legacies. These “deliberate pairings” of content and form substantiate the exploration of “my recessive/dominant other.”

“Double, double.” While Haaland’s meditative lyrics honor her position between “My mother, long dead,” and “my son / ahead,” she admits she’s “not content with reduction to a few generations.” Haaland’s “in a long / conversation about omens.” Her poems are populated by “ghosts,” “angels,” “shadows,” and, in a “desire” to “expand the circle,” various other beings, including dogs, flies, and trees. Each is as much a “part of the conversation” as the “watcher,” “protector,” “coward,” and “romantic” aspects of herself.

Instead of a fixed identity, Haaland views herself in a process of “becoming” that allows her to continually rethink her existence, which in turn allows her poems to reframe it. Death’s “eccentric shadow” coexists with beauty’s “brilliance on a hill / covered in blossoms, each / a cluster, a spear.” And in Haaland’s poems, each is “a glimpse of the infinite.”

If I Had Said Beauty by Tami Haaland. Lost Horse Press, March 2025.

Book Review :: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a meditation on the suicide of her youngest son, James, who died at the age of nineteen. That death took place a bit over six years after the suicide of her older son, Vincent. This book is not an attempt to explain why James made the same decision as his older brother or to come to any sort of understanding of what Li and/or her husband could have done differently. Li is clear that speculation doesn’t do her or her husband or her sons any good at all. Instead, as the title of one of her chapters says, “Children Die, and Parents Go on Living.” One of the threads that runs through this book is the idea that she must take life as she finds it, not as it might have been.

One of the other main ideas is that of the abyss, which is where Li and her husband now find themselves. She reflects on the idea of grief and how some people view it as something one gets through, an idea that seems to repulse Li. She sees it as an insult to the dead if, at some point, she were to believe she has gotten through grief, dusted herself off, and gone back to life. Instead, she believes that she now lives in the abyss and will always live there, that the grief is simply a part of her life and that she will always shape herself around.

It might strike readers as odd, then, that Li talks about how she behaved after her son’s death, as she had a piano lesson days after receiving the news, in addition to her continuing her work writing a novel and teaching. If someone didn’t know her well, if they were only looking at the outside, it would seem her son’s death hadn’t affected her. However, as Li uses her title to remind readers, her way of dealing with grief is to continue doing what she loves and what makes her who she should be, just as nature will continue to grow, whatever happens in the world.

Li’s approach to grief is not one that some readers will share, which is all the more reason for them to read her book. We can never understand how others sustain themselves when such tragedy strikes their lives, but works such as Li’s provide an insight into at least one person’s way of processing such suffering. Reading such a work should provide us with more empathy not only for Li, but for ourselves and others, especially when we deal with grief and loss in ways others might not understand.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten takes on authoritarians, autocrats, oligarchs, and fascists — terms she uses interchangeably — in Why Fascists Fear Teachers. The book is a fierce denunciation of the political movement working to destroy democracy, undermine trade unions, subvert multiculturalism, and decimate public education. It’s also a clear and passionate argument in support of teachers and public schools. “We cannot create a truly democratic, inclusive nation committed to opportunity for all without public schools,” she writes. “Fascists fight against public education because they want to control our minds, control our ideas, and control the future. And what do teachers do? They teach. It’s that simple.” 

Conversely, Weingarten writes, fascists support banning books, limiting the free exchange of ideas, and narrowing curricular offerings, all while simultaneously championing white, male, Christian supremacy. Moreover, the Trump administration has made privatizing education through universal vouchers and charter schools an explicit goal —shifts that the AFT and other unions have lambasted as wasteful of taxpayer money and often hurtful to students.  

The dichotomy Weingarten presents could not be clearer, with teachers on one side and fascists on the other.

Weingarten draws on history, from ancient societies to the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet, to expose the manifold harms caused by authoritarian rule. She also outlines the looming danger of fascist governance here in the U.S. and zeroes in on the harm caused by DOGE and Executive Orders outlawing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

Weingarten sugar-coats nothing; nonetheless, the book is not all doom and gloom. Multiple examples of teachers working with community residents to meet the needs of unhoused, hungry, and disabled students showcase teachers’ largely unheralded and inspiring work. Moreover, Weingarten is optimistic that we can derail the Trump agenda if we organize in the streets, in our union halls, and at the ballot box.

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten, Penguin Random House, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/

Book Review :: Atavists by Lydia Millet

Atavists by Lydia Millet book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Atavists, Lydia Millet’s latest collection of short stories, continues her preoccupation with the climate crisis, the backdrop (or centerpiece) to most of her recent writing. In these interlocking stories, she follows one family and various people connected to them, giving each character one story titled with something ended in -ist, such as “artist,” “mixologist,” or “optimist.” The “atavist” in the title raises the question of whether Millet means to imply that the characters are rediscovering some genetic characteristic after several generations of absence (perhaps a concern with the climate crisis) or are organisms that have characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism (ignoring the climate crisis, as generations of people have done). Or both, of course.

One of the main characters concerned with the climate crisis is Nick, who has attended Stanford to earn a degree in scriptwriting and who has moved back home to live with his parents and sister while he writes his first screenplay. Through various stories, it becomes clear that he is unable to write his fantasy screenplay, and he’s losing interest in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which causes him to lose his girlfriend, Chaya. He doesn’t see the point in most of what people do, given that there’s little chance of a foreseeable future. He does, however, find another girlfriend, Liza, who is taking a gap year from college. When her parents suggest volunteering, she finds purpose in helping residents of an assisted living facility understand their technology, which then morphs into helping them simply manage life.

Millet also shows characters who are not quite who they seem, sometimes through a clear contrast between the title of their story and how they behave, but also sometimes through their use or misuse of technology. For example, “Pastoralist” reveals the main character, Les, to be a predatory user of women, finding those he believe will be insecure because of their weight, then staying with them for no more than a few months until he gets bored and moves on to what he would describe as another sheep that needs to be sheared.

In the final story, “Optimist,” Millet makes it clear that she’s not one when it comes to people’s acknowledging the reality of the environmental destruction they have already caused and that only continues to worsen. She does portray characters who care, though, both about the environment and one another, even if they don’t always know what to do with those emotions, which helps elevate these stories beyond simply drawing attention to the climate crisis to a portrayal of our day-to-day lives.

Atavists by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson

Book Review :: King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

With acrimonious relations going back almost 50 years, it can be easy to forget that the United States and Iran were once close allies. After a CIA-backed military coup granted shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi authoritarian powers in 1953, U.S. presidents and policymakers deemed Iran a source of Middle East stability for a quarter century and growing demand for oil during the 1970s made Iran’s elite rich. By the end of that decade, a dying shah’s admittance to American exile for cancer treatment triggered a diplomatic hostage crisis and the end of the special relationship.

“Collapse on the magnitude of that which occurred in Imperial Iran in the 1970s simply cannot be attributable to the actions of one king,” Scott Anderson writes in his new book, King of Kings, explaining that the incompetence or corruption of many actors played a role in the Iranian Revolution. Anderson provides a compelling narrative relying on previous research, documentation, and his own interviews with inside sources like Americans employed in Iran at the time and the shah’s now octogenarian widow, Farah, still living in American exile.

Though a hostile government prevents a truly clear view of the event, King of Kings succeeds in giving Western readers a picture of a revolution that’s had great consequences for both the Middle East and the West to this day. It may not be light reading, but those looking for a better understanding of how modern Iran came to be will certainly benefit.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson. Doubleday, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner

A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Janet Kintner graduated from law school in 1968, she was rejected by employers who told her point-blank that they did not – and would not – hire a woman.  This, despite the fact that she had passed the bar exam in Arizona and California and had graduated at the top of her class. While she eventually secured a much-loved position with the Legal Aid Society in San Diego, Kintner never forgot the sexist banter she heard or the demeaning comments directed at her by male attorneys and courthouse staff. But she refused to quit. 

A subsequent job with the City Attorney’s office gave her the opportunity to prosecute exploitative businesses, and she developed a niche in the then-developing field of consumer law. Her work drew notice and, in 1976, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed her to the bench. At the time of her swearing in, Kintner was 31 years old and seven months pregnant. Two years later, a contested election to maintain the seat forced her to face two male adversaries, one of whom hurled a near-constant barrage of personal insults at her. Her account of the successful campaign – when she was again pregnant – and of juggling a toddler and a demanding judgeship, is both humorous and harrowing. 

Kintner worked as a judge for a total of 47 years before retiring, and her look back, A Judge’s Tale, is important. Nonetheless, while she offers a stark denunciation of sexist behavior, she seems wholly disconnected from the many feminist campaigns waged by law students and attorneys to win equity and respect. Likewise, she alludes to unspecified marital discord, but offers few clues about why she waited three decades to call it quits. They’re disappointing omissions. Still, A Judge’s Tale is an inspiring book, detailing one woman’s quest for recognition and power. It’s a worthwhile memoir.

A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner. She Writes Press, December 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/

Book Review :: Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

“Loss is a sentry,” writes Kimberly Blaeser in Ancient Light. In her sixth collection of poems, the Anishinaabe poet, photographer, scholar, and activist stands “in the shadow of old losses,” watching over the human and ecological wreckage caused by some of the most devastating social issues of our time, including the epidemic of violence against Indigenous Women, the “hidden graves” at Native American boarding schools, the unrepatriated Ancestors who “wait” on museum “shelves in numbered boxes,” the disruptions to daily life, work, and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Politics / a super spreader,” and extractive environmental practices like “clearcutting” and “copper mines.”

Blaeser fills her narrative, lyric, and visual poems “with left behind,” with “an abundance we make / of the broken.” Each poem is a “vessel of fire,” carrying the “torch of language” to pay homage to Ancestors and praise legacies of “kinship” with all beings and land. Through poems, photographs, and drawings, Blaeser offers Indigenous stories and lifeways as a means of hope and resilience: “Let us mask / ourselves in hope — all broken of these histories.”

In stunning contrast to “this legacy” of trauma, Blaeser offers a series of ten poems, scattered throughout the collection, entitled “The Way We Love Something Small.” Each of these poems offers “a writ consolation” and “a mended silence.” By connecting to the “sweet notes” of other beings such as “spring peepers,” “newborn mice,” an “egret heronry,” and “Vowel sounds from the land” — “each oldest song / survivance.”

Throughout Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser artfully balances speaking “ill of the living” and blessing “the hollowed out sorrows.” Emerging from the despair of “these histories” and “lost futures,” Blaeser’s ceremonial poems use words to “transfigure” this “memory-tangle,” this pain-tangle into an “ancient ballad of continuance.” Ancient Light is a compassionate, wise, and necessary book.

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser. University of Arizona Press, January 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When award-winning professor and writer Ashley Farmer (Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era) discovered that there were no full-length biographies of influential Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1996), she set out to rectify the omission. The result, Queen Mother, charts Moore’s ascent as a community leader, first as a follower and supporter of Marcus Garvey, then as a leader in the US Communist Party, and finally as an advocate of reparations to the Black community for the sin of slavery and the continuing damage wrought by racism and white supremacy. It’s a powerful, insightful, and evocative look at a woman who eschewed feminism but made sure that her voice was heard by the men who led the movements she championed.

For most of her life, Moore was a revered speaker, writer, and activist, and spent decades working to galvanize support for the establishment of a separate Black nation within the US. She was also outspoken in her opposition to the integrationist efforts of those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed racial equality was both preferable and possible. Moore vehemently disagreed, and her efforts brought her into contact with the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, as well as leaders of numerous newly independent African Nations.

Dubbed Queen Mother, she hobnobbed with controversial figures including dictator Idi Amin and Louis Farrakhan, and spoke out in favor of polygamy. Thrice married and the mother of one son, she nonetheless made “the movement” her priority. While readers may question this and other choices made by Moore, Queen Mother is a brilliant look at one woman’s passionate quest for social justice, peace, and racial equity. It’s a beautifully drawn and provocative portrait of a fascinating activist and leader.

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer. Pantheon Books, November 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton

The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”

The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”

The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”

In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”

The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.

The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton. Delete Press, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s highly anticipated second novel [following 2018’s My Sister, The Serial Killer], brings readers into the middle-to-upper-class community of Lagos, Nigeria, and its adjacent suburbs and tells a complicated story that questions the role of fate in determining how our lives unfold.

The story centers on the economically comfortable Falodin family, whose older generation believes that the household’s women are plagued by a long-standing curse that prohibits them from forming lasting heterosexual relationships. For cousins Ebun and Monife, both of whom consider themselves modern and well-educated, the idea that they can be punished for the sins of past generations seems preposterous. At the same time, their intellectual skepticism runs head-on into tradition, and when Monife unexpectedly dies at age 25, her death leaves 21-year-old Ebun scrambling to make sense of what has happened.

Her difficulties are made worse by the premature birth of her daughter, Eniiye, on the day of Monife’s burial. Moreover, her emotional upheaval is exacerbated by the fact that Eniiye looks shockingly similar to Monife, a reality that has neighbors, family, and friends dubbing the child a reincarnation. This not only leaves Ebun reeling but puts tremendous pressure on the child who wants little more than to be herself.

It’s a soap opera, for sure, but Braithwaite is a spectacular writer who manages to make this a compelling and satisfying intergenerational drama. Although some of what transpires is predictable, the deft handling of Eniiye’s coming of age and her subsequent pursuit of romance is touching and emotionally resonant. Cursed Daughters is told in the alternating voices of Ebun, Eniiye, and Monife and moves back and forth between several decades. But as the puzzle pieces come into frame, secrets, silences, and superstitions are parsed and upended. The end result is that Eniiye does what her foremothers could not and emerges as an autonomous, bold, and independent woman. It’s a transition to cheer.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Doubleday, November 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, takes the form a of diary — or a devotional, perhaps, as it does reveal a type of devotion — of an unnamed narrator who withdraws from the world. The narrator first comes to the convent as a way to escape the world, which has begun to seem overwhelming to her. Her husband has moved to take a new job, and the narrator thinks it’s obvious that the relationship is over. However, the main motivator seems to be her feeling that she can’t do any good in the world, which had been her career and focus.

She ran the Threatened Species Rescue Center, but she now feels she has done as much harm as she had good. Thus, she visits the convent to take some time to reboot. In the second section of the novel, however, she has become a participant in the community, though not quite on the path to become a nun. In fact, she doesn’t really have any faith in God, though she likes the idea of attention as a type of devotion. She left rather abruptly, as she references people from her previous life who feel betrayed by her quick departure, especially given that she didn’t notify them.

The convent is also near where the narrator grew up, and she seems to be mourning the relatively recent death of her mother — who had died before her first visit to the convent — who did good in the community in a quiet manner, unlike the narrator’s work. She interacts with a schoolmate from her childhood, Helen Parry, an activist nun who has come to the convent during the pandemic to deliver the bones of a nun who worked with her, but who began her time at this convent. The narrator admits that she and others bullied Helen when she was in school, though Helen doesn’t seem to concern herself with that part of her childhood, as she had a mother who struggled with mental illness and was abusive.

This novel is pared down to the essentials, much like the landscape that surrounds the convent, focusing on the narrator’s reflections on what it means to live a good life, mainly through the contrast between an ascetic life as a nun and that of a highly visible activist. Neither the narrator nor Wood attempt to provide an answer to that question, as they want readers to answer it for themselves.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Riverhead Books, February 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Heart, Be at Peace, reads like a collection of interlocked short stories, with each chapter having a different character as the narrator and focus. Thus, the novel shows several scenes from different perspectives, changing the way the reader sees each character again and again. As such, Ryan’s focus is on character and community, as opposed to plot. The characters live in a small town in Ireland where everybody seems to know or be related to one another, but the area is changing, largely due to a group of young men selling drugs. The question that runs through the novel, then, is whether anybody will do anything about that problem and, if so, what will they do and who will do it.

At the core of the novel, though, is the idea of heart — as the title implies — and relationships. Some of those are traditional, romantic relationships, such as Bobby and Triona, who have what seems to be a solid marriage and family, though Bobby worries that he’s worse than his father was; or Sean and Réaltín, who don’t have a healthy marriage, though Sean tries to find a way to set them back on course, taking an unhealthy way to try to get there.

There are also a number of parent-child relationships or even grandparent-child connections. Millie develops a bond with her grandmother, Lily, whom people believe to be a witch, a description that might be accurate, only to risk that relationship because she begins dating Augie, the main drug dealer in town. Mags’ father Josie tries to rebuild the connection with his son Pokey, who has just gotten out of jail for fraud, and the relationship with his daughter whom he pushed away because of her sexual orientation.

Throughout the novel, characters define and redefine what love looks like for them and for others, often through the question of what they’re willing to do for those around them. Those answers often surprise them and those they love as much as they do the reader, but they can’t deny their hearts, even when they lead them astray, but especially when they lead them back to those they need.

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan. Viking, May 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Nussaibah Younis’s debut, Women’s-Prize-shortlisted novel, Fundamentally, follows Nadia, a young woman from England who begins a job working for the United Nations deradicalizing women who joined ISIS. She has no training for the job, only an article she wrote in graduate school, and she takes the job to get out of an unhealthy relationship as much as for any other reason. She is out of her depth, as she readily admits and as her new co-workers can clearly see. However, she begins working as best she can on a program, which leads her to go to a refugee camp in Iraq, where she’s based, to meet the women there.

Everything changes when she meets Sara, a young Muslim woman from England, who reminds Nadia of herself when she was younger. Nadia was once a devout Muslim, but she has left her faith behind, which led to a falling out from her mother, exacerbated by Nadia’s relationship with Rosy, her roommate and sometime lover (Nadia believes it’s more than sometimes). Sara doesn’t engage in the programs Nadia begins, but they talk almost every time Nadia comes to the camp, and Nadia begins planning ways she can help Sara. Part of the problem with that help comes from the UN itself, as Younis ‘sends up the bureaucracy’ and in-fighting that prevents any true progress from occurring. Nadia angers almost everybody involved, but then finds a way to placate them again, mainly through providing them with money through budget lines and some sort of control, or at least the illusion of it.

However, when Nadia tries to get Sara out of the refugee camp and back home, a number of circumstances prevent that from happening, so Nadia goes outside of the traditional UN structure to try to help Sara. She has help from her co-workers, who seem as disenchanted with the organization as Nadia does, but she begins to realize that Sara is not quite who she seems to be. Younis uses her comic novel to critique Western views of Muslims, as well as those organizations that work to help, but often find themselves out of their depth, all while creating characters readers can both laugh at and resonate with.

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Tiny Reparations Books, February 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of +scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston

A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston mainly spotlights her personal story, beginning with her focus on running and dieting to lose weight and the unhappiness that brought, leading to her discovery of weightlifting and the varieties of strength that came with it. She weaves in her relationships that reflect the emotional strength she ultimately developed from weightlifting, as well as her relationship with her mother. Last, Johnston clearly uses research to help her view the world at large, so she works in a variety of sources that talk about weightlifting and dieting, especially as it relates to women.

My only complaint about the book comes from the fact that I’m a runner, and Johnston didn’t have a positive experience there, but that’s because she connected it to weight loss and diet culture. One aspect of lifting she values — the importance of fueling to perform and the need to recover — is similarly important for those of us who try to run our best times, as she does with lifting. Though, to her point, when she was focused on running, the conversation around weight and diet was much less healthy than it is now. That said, her critique of diet culture is spot on, as she moves away from a system and culture that repeatedly tells people — especially women — to deny themselves, then criticizes them when they fail to do so.

Johnston also presents the positives of lifting, especially within the gym, where she expected to find a masculine approach that wouldn’t welcome her. When she reports a man filming her, the two young men working the desk act quickly, confronting the man and banning him from the gym. When she struggles to complete a lift on the first day, Dimitrios, an older Greek man who spends hours in the gym each day, helps her out, but encourages her, as opposed to shaming her.

Johnston not only builds physical strength, but that development leads to her inner development, as she leaves an unhealthy relationship and begins to develop a stronger sense of self. In fact, she becomes her best self by the end of the book, stronger in every way, a heavy lift that she has worked toward for years and finally accomplishes.

A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette), May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee

I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

“I never knew if I was trying to win my mother’s heart or God’s when I wrote poems,” says Li-Young Lee in his new chapbook, I Ask My Mother to Sing. Both figures feature prominently in the slim volume that collects mother-themed poems from each of Lee’s six collections since 1986, along with seven new poems. It’s the latest in a series of “new and collected” chapbooks from notable late-career poets, including Rae Armantrout’s climate change poems and Yusef Komunyakaa’s love poems.

The book’s title poem alludes to Lee’s mother and grandmother wistfully singing songs about the old China from which they were exiled following the Communist revolution. A rocky childhood in Indonesia and other countries hostile to ethnic Chinese on his way to the U.S. colors both Lee’s poems and his close maternal feelings. Not many people, after all, can credibly say that their mother carried them “across two seas and four borders, / fleeing death by principalities and powers,” as he writes in “The Blessed Knot.”

This collection is well-timed following Lee’s 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and last year’s well-received The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton). Whether readers are new to these poems or already familiar with Lee’s work, they can get a great feel for a classic poet at a reasonable price. As both a reader and the editor of a chapbook-focused magazine, I hope Wesleyan University Press keeps these gems coming.

I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee ed. Oliver Egger. Wesleyan University Press, August 2025.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: DEED by torrin a. greathouse

Deed by Torrin A. Greathouse book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In DEED, torrin a. greathouse delves into the origins of word and action, crafting a vibrant “queer lexicon” that reflects new possibilities for engaging with trans life and sexuality. This collection, while acknowledging themes of betrayal, consciously steps away from a trauma-centric narrative. The poems are infused with a sense of liberation, free from the “stigma” often associated with discussions of trans desire and chronic illness. Although they carry a history of violence and oppression intertwined with desire and choice, the poems embrace a refreshing, unapologetic exploration of intimacy without guilt.

One of the most striking aspects of this collection is the way words transition from meaning something to doing something, combining etymological “miracle” and mythological “metaphor.” A “verb can carry many meanings.” Take “swallow”: to resist expressing; to believe unquestioningly; to cause to disappear; the muscular movement of the esophagus. This range of definitions offers greathouse the possibilities of “What language is there for survival.”

The poet’s style exhibits remarkable control, perhaps a response to the intense subject matter, which includes themes of transition, sex work, and the complexities of dominant-submissive relationships. Notably, greathouse employs poetic forms such as the “burning haibun” and “cleave tanka.” Each embodies a sense of duality, wherein two expressions cleaved together or apart create a dynamic interplay of ideas. This structural doubleness echoes the content, “born / from the severance of” — transitioning from victimization to empowerment through sexuality. In these chimeric forms, greathouse creates transformations of context and meaning.

At times, greathouse invites patience from the reader with phrases like “Bear with me,” hinting at the demanding nature of her subject matter while simultaneously encouraging an engagement with the profound exploration of identity and desire within the poetry. In “trusting the broken / / machine of my desire,” torrin A. greathouse is held by words and creates new “cognates” for belonging.

DEED by torrin a. greathouse. Wesleyan University Press, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

If one were to look in the acknowledgements at the end of The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien’s new novel, it would appear as if she has written traditional historical fiction, given the number of books and authors she references. However, her novel is more complex than that. There’s one main plotline that involves Lina, who has run away from Foshan, China, it seems, with her father. They now live beside the Sea, though what sea that is varies based on who one asks. They almost seem to be in a temporary refugee resettlement camp, as many people stay there for brief periods of time, then leave on ships. Lina and her father, Wui Shin, stay there for years, though, as her father is sick.

When they fled — the reader finds out why in the middle section of the book, which flashes back to Wui Shin’s younger days — Lina’s father took three books from a series of books on explorers; Lina even complains that they were not her favorite three, which is why they were less worn than the others. The three explorers are Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt, as the series authors included those who explored mentally as well as geographically.

Lina and her father’s room in a building seems to be outside of time in some way — the connection between time and space is a recurring theme in the novel — and their room connects to a room where three people live: Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher. When they find out about the three books Lina has read and reread, they point out how much the books have omitted, and each of them tell her all that’s missing from those three people’s lives, about which they seem to know much more than they should.

What ties the novel together is the theme of oppression and power, as Wui Shin and Lina are fleeing an oppressive Chinese regime, much as Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt all had to deal with people in power who tried to repress their thinking, as well as physically oppressing or killing those who disagreed with them. Thien has crafted a work of historical fiction that connects several characters who try to survive, recording their lives and struggles, so that those who live in a time where there are still those who try to suppress ideas and oppress people can find connection and hope.

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien. W.W. Norton, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman

Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Jill Hoffman’s Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves features a candid and unfiltered poetics that demystifies the fame surrounding poets and writers. This reflects her long-standing involvement as a poet and editor of Mudfish magazine and Box Turtle Press in New York City. Hoffman’s poems read like “a story streamed forth / like a show on Netflix, seasons of episodes / that hook you into long nights of binge- / watching.” Hoffman’s poetry is confessional in the truest sense, free of pretension and deeply human.

Her poems sometimes take the form of aubades, sonnets, ekphrasis, villanelles, or fairy tales, but they are most often written as epistles, inviting readers to become confidants. Hoffman’s writing is reminiscent of the New York School poets and includes name-drops of figures like John Ashbery, one of the most renowned among them. Her style is vivid, urban, and unafraid, weaving together themes of medical concerns, old age, and death, with relationship desires and editorial responsibilities, featuring kimonos, “clogged toilets,” a “tree wearing mermaid earrings,” and a dog named Vermeer, along with plenty of anecdotes about dog walking and dinner parties.

Through her everything-out-in-the-open poems, readers gain insight into Hoffman as a writer confronting her own biases regarding her “privileged heart” while simultaneously addressing her Jewish heritage. She also reveals her experiences as a mother estranged from her daughter, who she feels has “betrayed” her. Beneath the lively and playful nature of these poems lies the deep pain of their fractured relationship.

As she weighs her life “on the scales,” Hoffman’s humanity shines through her imperfect responses, faux pas, and awkward moments. By sharing her “old funny life / Of heartbreak / And ecstasy” in this sincere manner, she helps dismantle the taboos surrounding artistic, diasporic, and societal expectations, offering a book “to make a reader fall in love.”

Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman. Box Turtle Press, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross

Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In Stronger, Michael Joseph Gross gives a historical overview of the importance of muscle throughout one’s life by centering on three different people and areas. Gross’s background as an investigative reporter shows as he divides the book into three sections: one that focuses on Charles Stocking, a professor of classics and kinesiology, and draws on how the Greeks and Romans viewed strength; a second with Jan Todd as the core, showing how women’s strength developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the final portion building on Maria Fiatarone Singh’s research on strength in older adults.

Throughout the book, Gross uses a wide range of resources, as his acknowledgements and notes sections make clear, to make the argument that strength training, especially through heavy lifting, benefits people in all areas of health, no matter their background, age, gender, or any other identifying aspect. The experts he refers to point out how medicine and politics have overlooked the importance of building strength, focusing on pills and policies that are less effective.

Strength isn’t a how-to manual, but a work that should serve as an inspiration to begin the journey of building strength, whatever that looks like at any stage of life, drawing on stories from Stocking, Todd, and Singh to show how everyone can benefit from incorporating strength training into their lives. The research that surrounds the information from Stocking, Todd, and Singh’s reinforces the work they have done to make a compelling argument that building strength can help us all live longer and healthier lives.

Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross. Dutton, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall

More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Poet, essayist, and activist Margaret Randall’s latest book, More Letters from the Edge, follows the April 2025 release of Letters From the Edge, a series of chronologically-organized excerpts from written exchanges between the noted author and five intellectuals and artists on the political left. In More Letters, Randall continues this pattern. This time, however, she zeroes in on her communications with poet-writer-teacher Arturo Arango; former member of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin (1943-2022); graphic artist and painter Jane Norling; and retired museum curator Robert Schweitzer. The emails and letters that Randall includes are fascinating, allowing readers to glimpse the ways these progressive activists have blurred the artificially constructed line that typically separates personal life from political struggles.

In fact, although most of the missives center on politics and social concerns – the struggle to earn enough to pay the bills; growing censorship and repression in Cuba, and the deleterious impact of the long-standing US blockade of the island; the ethical, racial and gender dynamics surrounding U.S. museum exhibitions; and whether violence can ever be justified in pursuit of social betterment – this is a moving celebration of friendship. Indeed, the connections between Randall and the people she corresponds with reveal deep bonds that have flourished despite periodic set-backs and obstacles.

It’s an intriguing showcase for relationships that are based on shared, and sometimes evolving, values. Randall calls her friends outriders and says that all four serve as ”bridges between cultures, between languages, between ideas. They bring people together and strengthen communities.”

The same can be said of Randall. More Letters models what it means to live an engaged life and maintain a steadfast commitment to peace and progressive social justice while simultaneously pursuing personal fulfillment. It’s an inspiring, revelatory book.

More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall. New Village Press, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Slip by Lucas Schaefer

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The basic premise of Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, The Slip, is simple: Nathaniel Rothstein went missing in the summer of 1998, and he’s still missing more than a decade later. However, it takes almost five hundred pages to explore the characters who are closely related to that disappearance — his uncle, Bob Alexander; his supervisor/mentor, David Dalice; and Sasha, his 1-900 Russian girlfriend, of sorts — and those who seem to circle loosely around what happened — Miriam Lopez, a police officer who wasn’t even on the force in the 1990s; Alexis Cepeda, an up-and-coming boxer; and Ed Hooley, a troubled, middle-aged man who appeared at the boxing gym around which all the characters circle (Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym) out of nowhere.

“The slip” is a move in boxing where one dodges a punch by seeming to move one’s head, but actually creates the move through an adjustment of the legs. The first half of the novel tends to focus on the fact that nobody in the novel is exactly who they say they are, some because they don’t yet know who they are, especially the younger characters; some because they don’t want others to know who they really are; and some because they can’t seem to stop being somebody they’re not. As Schaefer moves later in the novel, though, he begins raising larger questions around race, immigration, and policing, all of which connect to the first half because there are also characters who are unable or unwilling to see others as they truly are.

In some cases, characters grow into their new selves, such as one character who transitions from male to nonbinary to female, ultimately becoming comfortable being who she’s always wanted to be. Others, though, put on a face to match the world’s expectations of who they should be, and that face ultimately becomes their face, even when such a change causes them to lose part of the goodness of who they once were.

Ultimately, the novel explores the question of how one defines themselves, for both good and ill. Like many American novels, it’s concerned with identity, as the relatively young country still is. It shows an Austin, Texas, that is changing in ways that it might not like, just as the U.S. has changed in the twentieth century in ways that lead to citizens not seeing each other as they are. Schaefer has written a substantial novel that’s asking important questions at a time when those questions need better answers.

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. Simon & Schuster, June 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The narrator of Ocean Vuong’s second novel, Hai, is a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant whose life isn’t following the traditional stereotype. Though he was the first in his family to attend college, he dropped out and returned home to New Gladness, Connecticut, a fictional town with struggles that mirror so many cities that once were centers of industry. He tells his mother he’s been accepted to medical school in Boston, but he actually intends to jump from a bridge. An eighty-something-year-old woman in the house next to the river, Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant, stops him from jumping, and he becomes her caretaker as she descends into dementia.

The core of the novel is Hai’s job at HomeMarket, a restaurant clearly modeled on Boston Market, where he forms meaningful relationships with BJ, Maureen, Wayne, Russia, and Sony (his cousin). Each person has struggles and dreams, wanting to move on from the low-wage job, and they each support one another as best they can. That’s especially true with Hai and Sony, given their family relationship, as Sony’s mother is in prison, and Sony is living in a group home, as he has been diagnosed with autism and is unable to live on his own.

While Hai helps others with their problems, he is unable to manage his drug addiction. He has recently come out of three weeks at a rehab facility, but he has begun using again, largely drawing from the drugs Grazina’s husband had around the house before he died. The shadow of the Vietnam war hangs over the novel, as Sony believes his father was a soldier in the war, but Sony is obsessed with the Civil War, even favoring the Southern side, given that he and Hai are from the Southern part of Vietnam, ignoring the racism that motivated the South. The novel is also set in the financial crisis of 2008, reinforcing the decline of New Gladness, and leading to Hai’s lack of employment options in the town.

Vuong wants his readers to see those people who survive on low-wage jobs that literature often overlooks and the ways in which they help each other do so. Rather than competing with one another for hours, when a regional manager wants BJ to fire one of the crew, they try to volunteer to give up some shifts for each other. Though each of them have concerns of their own, they create a type of family in a place most readers wouldn’t expect to find one.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Penguin Books, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: The Utopians by Grace Nissan

The Utopians by Grace Nissan book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Utopians, Grace Nissan provides a tangible exploration of an artist’s fascination with Thomas More (1478–1535) and his fictional work, Utopia, published in 1516. Nissan’s book resonates with and responds to More’s in three distinct ways. Nissan’s text is assembled from the language “parts available” in More’s. The Utopians features a series of “Dear More” letters and includes a serial poem entitled “The World,” which underscores the tensions between origins and change. “The first world was a world, the second invention. The first world was a world, the second critique.” To survive, Nissan’s “second world had to cannibalize” More’s “first world.”

While Thomas More’s narrative primarily depicts the religious, social, and political customs of a fictional island, Nissan’s narrative addresses the current socio-political upheaval “in terms of money.” It highlights the devastating consequences of capitalism’s “territorial lust and imperial phantoms,” and the chaos caused by the relentless pursuit of “private property” and the “production of luxury.” These situations reflect the indifference of the wealthy toward the “miracles” achieved by those who contribute their labor to “mend roads / clean out ditches / repair bridges.”

As The Utopians is also a formal exploration of artistic “invention” and “critique,” it emphasizes the need to confront “prison & syntax.” Throughout the collection, the refrain “I must tell you about…” is supplemented by: “the Utopians,” “the towns,” their “debates,” “wars,” “scribes,” “language,” and “death.” This leads to a “Semantic satiation of the world.”

Being “starved of meaning” and “losing meaning through repetition” results in a world “grim & desolate.” The critique appears to have succeeded only in a reshuffling that “rebuilt the things it abolished, in negation.” “History” comes back. Nissan’s lyric elegiac poetry, reflecting social transformation and political upheaval, reads like an “epitaph.” After all, “aren’t all human beings / sort of war damage”?

The Utopians by Grace Nissan. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Though Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book was published in 2021, it has only become more relevant with the rise of and reliance on AI. O’Gieblyn explores how we think about this emerging technology and the effects of that thought process on our humanity and theology. She draws on a variety of philosophers, especially those from the middle part of the twentieth century who were dealing with the horrors of World War II and the role technology played in it, as well as her personal experience, as she attended a fundamentalist Bible college before leaving her faith behind.

One of the main ways O’Gieblyn thinks through technology’s role in and effects on our lives is through the metaphors we use, as we often refer to ourselves, especially our minds/brains, as machines — for example, we talk about processing information or experiences, as if our minds are CPUs or servers. Similarly, we anthropomorphize technology, a comparison that has only become more pronounced as computers, especially AI, have begun to mimic humans more convincingly — many of us use he/she pronouns to refer to our GPS, to name one example.

O’Gieblyn ties all of these comparisons to theology, as we have begun to speak of computers and AI as having predictive capabilities, as when a website suggests a book or movie we might like. Since even the creators of some algorithms and AI admit they don’t quite know how they work, they become like a god that is beyond our understanding. The problem then occurs when we make them into a sovereign god — like the Calvinist God whom humans should not question because of their omnipotence and omniscience — as we have begun trusting machines to make decisions. Thus, we lose our humanity, depending too much on something we see as beyond us.

O’Gieblyn wants to remind readers of the stakes in such an off-loading, as technology that doesn’t take our humanity into consideration (or humans who don’t realize what they’re giving up) will lead to a technology and to lives without purpose or meaning.

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Doubleday, August 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.

Book Review :: In the Wake by Ariel Machell

In the Wake by Ariel Machell book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Comet Neowise was visible in the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky during July 2020. A group of friends “camping near the water to see” the comet serves as the backdrop for Ariel Machell’s debut chapbook, In the Wake, which explores the theme of “fleetingness,” asking: “How much will we allow to pass us by?”

Predominantly composed of prose poems, the collection is an apostrophe to the Willamette River, an elegy for past intimacy, a celebration of cosmic phenomena, and introspective “thinking about what made an ending.” The poems alternate between addressing Memory as an intimate other and recounting the camping trip when the comet “erupted” into the group’s shared vision, propelling readers toward philosophical inquiry about the essence of memory and how it navigates the complexities of time and distance.

Machell’s writing is firmly rooted in the river’s landscape and the relentless nature of memory, demonstrating a rich eco-philosophical elegiac lyricism. Her poetics prioritize felt experience over narrative clarity, offering deep intimacy while purposefully omitting specifics of the betrayal. “The sadness — I refused to explain it.” This absence inspires further inquiry: Does the origin of a feeling matter, or is the emotion itself the primary focus? The lack of definitive answers is among the collection’s strengths, embracing the “indefinite” with vulnerability.

Machell captures the “idea,” “image,” and “feel of” grief without resolution, allowing each poem to stir with the potential to “wake.” A vigil, disturbed water, an emergence — the triple entendre of the collection’s title allows “Possibility to do all the heavy work.” The title allows the poet-speaker to mourn the end of a romantic relationship, navigate the disturbed water left behind memory’s boat, and to catalyze “Waking up.” Some endings are beginnings.

In the Wake by Ariel Machell. Finishing Line Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia

My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia book cover image

Review by Jennifer Martelli

In her poem, “Dead Leaves and Lost Daughters,” Elizabeth Sylvia writes, “Mania splits the mind like a pomegranate, red shell vexed / to mount a spine of arils. Memory, a scattering of seeds.” These seeds are planted throughout Sylvia’s newest collection, My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties. Here, memories take the form of ex-boyfriends, Facebook posts of an old mothers’ group, the shame of a father’s “rattly car / he bought off the town drunk. . .” The anxiety, rendered masterfully by this poet’s clear-eyed writing, is the ever-present tightrope balance between the speaker and her past, which lies fitfully on her shoulders.

The concept of the mother — both the speaker’s and the speaker as mother — underscores this tension. In her sonnet crown, “Mother’s Day,” Sylvia writes, “Midlife heat / flares in my chest, igniting old hurts.” The speaker’s estrangement from her mother is compounded by her own mothering,

                                               “See,” I tell no one
        who is listening, “I’ve fucked up less
        than others might have, not let emotion
        curdle into rage, repressed regrets” —
        and still, I know my own daughter sees
        I haven’t spoken to my mom in weeks.

The sonnet — that little song — is the perfect form for this emotional struggle. The sonnet insists upon constriction, both in line length and in sound. Sylvia constructs a sense of stasis by writing a crown of seven sonnets, each linked by motherhood, and by enclosing the whole poem with “I haven’t spoken to my mom in weeks.” Thus, Mother’s Day becomes every day.

The image of the bird — both constricted and free — flits throughout this book: a goldfinch, sparrows, angelic herons, “the grey cockatiel” in its cage, a “wired golden bird,” and “birds’ sleeping tears.” This last image, from “the largest possible quantity of anything is a lifetime,” where the speaker notes how moths will feed off a bird’s tears, and continues with clarity,

                                              We are 
        filled & yet float on the tears of others.
        In this lifetime, I too have drawn shares
        and scavenged from the sorrows
        of others for my own pale-nighted wings.

The poems in this collection are tender, honest, and graceful. Like the speaker’s daughter who stares at her with “solemn / weighing eyes,” My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties is large in what it encompasses, in its voice, and in its compassion. Elizabeth Sylvia insists that our lives are full of “great things even in their commonness.”

My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia. Ballerini Book Press, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Martelli is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree and The Queen of Queens, both longlisted by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER.

Book Review :: An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch

An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Historian of education Diane Ravitch was once a prolific writer and speaker on the U.S. right. As a fervent opponent of feminism and other contemporary social movements, she spent more than three decades championing education reforms that included charter schools, vouchers, and rigorous standardized testing. These positions not only won her plaudits from conservative leaders and think tanks, but also led to high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and hobnobbing with the powerful.

Over time, however, skepticism began to seep in and Ravitch began to question her long-held beliefs. “I saw that the toxic policy of federally mandated high-stakes testing was inflicting harm on students and teachers by establishing unattainable goals and demonizing public schools,” she writes in An Education. She also began to recognize the class and racial bias endemic to standardized testing, noting that high scores typically reflect access to wealth and privilege rather than intelligence or the ability to learn. Moreover, she saw that schools were failing to achieve their mission. “The experience of schooling should prepare young people to live and work with others in a democratic society and to contribute to the improvement of that society. Schools should encourage students to be the best they can be, not to be standardized into a preset mold.”

But they are not doing this.

An Education, part memoir and part analysis of failed state and federal reforms, takes contemporary policy makers to task for this failure. Honest, forthright, and wise, it’s an inside glimpse into the machinations of power from someone who has seen how ideas are used, manipulated, and sold to the public. It’s an important and insightful contribution to the field of educational policy and a passionate defense of public education.

An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch. Columbia University Press. October 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Book Eaters, Carolina Hotchandani presents poignant self-portraits as “a daughter,” “a mother,” and “a maker,” exploring themes of consumption, nourishment, and absorption. Across three impactful sections, the poet navigates her compelling “need to write / about my home, my ailing parents.” In her lyric poems, Hotchandani confronts her father’s language loss and impending death while grappling with her mother’s cancer diagnosis, all interwoven with the joys and trials of motherhood.

Hotchandani examines the complexities of her identity, shaped by her Brazilian mother and Indian father, and her experiences of giving birth to a daughter and writing poetry. Explicit in her exploration is the significance of Partition, representing not only a historical moment but also the emotional fragmentation echoing through generations. This duality of identity emerges incisively in Hotchandani’s roles as mother and writer, encapsulated in the lines: “As the baby drinks from my body my / milk, I edit my manuscript.” These words suggest that as the infant seeks nourishment, the mother-writer simultaneously seeks sustenance in ideas.

The poems vividly illustrate the interplay between losing and acquiring language, revealing how these experiences affect one’s sense of belonging — to oneself, family, and cultural heritage. In striking contrast, Hotchandani evokes imagery of insects infesting books against her father’s relentless hunger for fruit, symbolizing a haunting cycle of life and decay. “Satiation depends on the memory / of eating” encapsulates the insatiable nature of loss in the face of physical existence. Through these metaphors, Hotchandani also illustrates the struggles of motherhood and the weighty expectations imposed on women, raising questions about the gendered division of labor: How can a mother nourish herself while caring for another?

Ultimately, The Book Eaters artfully intertwines language, memory, and hunger, illuminating universal experiences of longing and loss in a debut that is “a love story, a bildungsroman,” and a book “to greet the real world.”

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani. Perugia Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Book Review :: The Names by Florence Knapp

The Names by Florence Knapp book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

It’s difficult to believe that The Names is Florence Knapp’s debut novel, as she easily handles three storylines, fully developing characters who are similar in each one. The novel begins with Cora going to register her new son’s name, walking with her nine-year-old-daughter Maia. In one of the three plots that follow, Cora listens to her daughter and names her son Bear. In the second, she selects Julian, while in the third, she follows her husband’s demand and names her son after his father, Gordon. Each choice affects the path they all take from that point forward, which Knapp updates every seven years, moving from 1987 to 2022.

In all three storylines, Cora’s husband is physically and emotionally abusive, which means that her decision about the name has an outsized effect. Knapp’s characterization of Cora’s rebellion or acquiescence to her husband, depending on the storyline, is one of the strengths of the novel, as all of her actions are understandable, given how women react in radically different ways in such a horrific situation. The one constant throughout is her devotion to her children, even when that looks radically different in each storyline.

What truly elevates this novel beyond what could be a gimmicky premise is that Knapp doesn’t fall back on easy plotting. If, in one storyline, Cora is able to leave her husband and try to create a different life for her children, the remainder of the story doesn’t guarantee an easy life for her or her children. Instead, each variation has complications and rewards, just as a life does for most people.

While the focus of the novel is on Bear, Julian, or Gordon (his names are the chapter titles for each seven-year increment), Cora is the backbone of the novel, helping to shape Maia and Bear into the people they become. Maia also gets to live a full life, as she questions her sexual orientation and tries to develop meaningful relationships in more or less supportive communities. All of the character’s names matter — Knapp has even provided a type of glossary at the back to show what the names mean and/or why Knapp chose them — as Knapp explores how names do and don’t define us. She also wants to ask how and why pasts shape us. As in life, she doesn’t provide easy answers, but I definitely wanted to spend time with these characters to see how they managed the questions.

The Names by Florence Knapp. Pamela Dorman Books, 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites