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Book Review :: Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza

Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In his poetry and collage hybrid Self Geofferential, Geoffrey Gatza is poetry’s equivalent of chief cook and bottle-washer. He created the book’s art, writing, design, typesetting, and cover. As he writes in the opening poem “Disappointment Apples”: “Under the unity of naming / I hoped to bridge the gap.” Gatza’s multifaceted artistic vision brings “a new light shining” on expansive and inventive possibilities.

That artistic possibility comes alive in the “gallant colorful celebrations” of his mixed media collages and the “strange melting shadows” of familial trauma stories. Gatza addresses the “biggest littlest sadness” of his childhood by rewriting fables such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Reimagining these stories offers Gatza a medium for a do-over where he can stand up to the abusive parents, “hateful” brothers, and “smug” sisters who did him wrong in his early life. By doing so in art, the “broken story is dragged upwards,” and Gatza salvages painful memories “to be made” into something new.

Gatza’s whimsical collages beautifully complement his self-reflective and tender-hearted poems. The poems make room for a “Birthday Girl” who is a “ruthless schemer,” a friend John who “was trouble,” those “wrongfully convicted suffering in jail,” Emily Dickinson, Clarice the cat, and all “Of those who have come before us and serve as markers of who we are / As people on this strange planet wondering what it is that we are all doing / Here.”

One thing Geoffrey Gatza does while here is celebrate “growing” and making. The reader finds him in the garden with primrose, and “in the kitchen cooking / Using up the bruised peaches for a summertime cobbler.”

Self Geofferential is fresh out of Geoffrey Gatza’s imagination. “Looking for the jointure,” between publisher and artist, collage and poetry, the past and present, the fractured and flourishing, Geoffrey Gatza emerges as a “champion of broken art.”

Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza. BlazeVOX [books], December 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 :: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sarah Ogilvie once worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, so she brings first-hand knowledge to her book. However, the strongest part of this work is her in-depth research — eight years in the making — to find the stories of so many people who contributed to the greatest dictionary in the English language. While some readers will be familiar with Simon Winchester’s book The Professor and the Madman (The Surgeon of Crawthorne in the UK), Ogilvie goes well beyond that to include hundreds of contributors, though there is a chapter on other contributors who spent time in mental institutions.

Ogilvie orders the book alphabetically, with subjects including H for Hopeless Contributors, K for Kleptomaniac; P for Pornographer; and V for Vicars (and Vegetarians). Through this approach, she reveals the breadth of people who shared their time and energy and (sometimes) expertise by collecting words for the OED. The only drawback to the book, in fact, is that these categories are arbitrary, at best, and constraining, at worst. However, that drawback is minor, as Ogilvie clearly needed an organizing principle to contain the multitudes who sent words to the OED, and this structure is as good as any to do so.

The book’s main strength, then, is the breadth of stories that Ogilvie was able to uncover. Using James Murray’s address book as a main source, Ogilvie tracks down the lost stories of people from all classes and all backgrounds, especially those on the margins of society, who helped create this mammoth work. She reminds readers that it was a true work of democracy, though Murray and the other editors were ultimately in charge; the dictionary simply wouldn’t exist without all of the contributors. Also, for word lovers, Ogilvie includes an array of words included in the dictionary that are there only because of the work of one person.

Because of her focus on the everyday people, Ogilvie reminds readers of what a society can accomplish when people come together. That’s a message that goes beyond the OED and one that goes beyond words themselves, especially in a world that’s so deeply divided.

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie. Vintage, October 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn

Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In January 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns went into effect, Dr. Melody Glenn took a part-time job at a methadone clinic in Tucson, Arizona. What she found was both appalling and frustrating. First, there was the staff’s condescension toward patients, all of whom were forced to wait in line to get a single dose of a drug that was meant to keep them from using heroin or other opioids. Then there were the periodic tox screenings and the mandatory supervision of patients who resented the constant oversight. Add in the public’s frequently-expressed apprehension about allowing a clinic for people who use drugs to exist in their communities, and it’s easy to see how and why staff burn out and become discouraged.

And it is not just methadone: According to Glenn, a similar reaction surrounds buprenorphine, a less-stringently regulated drug that also helps people reduce opioid dependency. As she began to probe the scorn surrounding these drugs, Glenn learned of Dr. Marie Nyswander, a once-prominent, if always controversial, New York physician who is credited with creating methadone. The unfolding story chronicles Nyswander’s complicated life – she was overtly critical of feminism despite being a pioneer in a largely male world – and reveals the many factors that have made – and continue to make – providing compassionate care to drug users difficult to sustain.

Glenn is a forceful advocate of harm reduction, and Mother of Methadone advocates a range of ways that the medical and social justice worlds can work together to create safe injection sites, distribute clean syringes and fentanyl test strips, and promote the use of Naloxone to reverse overdoses and prevent needless death. What’s more, the book offers a sensitive and progressive vision of medical care and presents a cogent argument against the continued criminalization of drug use.

Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn. Beacon Press, July 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 :: Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Medieval English historian Dan Jones dramatically delivers with Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King. After broader books covering the Knights Templar, the three-century Plantagenet dynasty, and the thirty-year Wars of the Roses which led to that dynasty’s end, Jones’s first biography impresses with its depth and research. The narrative draws readers into the life and times of one of the most celebrated Medieval kings.

Though Henry doesn’t become king until around the halfway mark, Jones maintains tension by foreshadowing dramatic events like Henry’s near-death at sixteen from an arrow fired at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Writing in present tense throughout, readers get young Henry’s view of his relative, and godfather, Richard II’s famous tyranny and subsequent deposition by Henry’s father. While carefully undermining certain famous characterizations, Jones recounts Henry’s maturation from the son of a Duke not in line for the throne, to warrior prince and heir, and finally to glorious king and conqueror.

The violence common in medieval histories plays a prominent role in Henry’s military accomplishments. Exploitation of civil war in France allowed Henry’s invasion and subsequent great victories at Agincourt and Harfleur, but also led to civilian horrors. Jones is clear-eyed about the “greatness” of medieval kingship impressing us less today and includes Henry’s many faults according to modern standards. Still, though sensitive readers should pass, lovers of the genre will find it a satisfying addition. Henry V lived a dramatic thirty-five years, dying at the height of his power, and Jones tells the tale with style.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones. Viking, October 2024.

Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: No Less Strange or Wonderful by A. Kendra Greene

No Less Strange or Wonderful by A. Kendra Greene book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The subtitle of A. Kendra Greene’s collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful, is “essays in curiosity,” an apt way to sum up this work. In essays ranging from one to thirty pages, often with illustrations Greene has either drawn or uncovered from books from the past four hundred years or so, Greene lets her curiosity run throughout the natural world.

In one essay, “Megalonyx Jeffersonii,” she writes about dressing up a model of a giant sloth, which leads to reflections on the debate in gender identification of such a species when there’s not enough evidence to determine a clear answer. Though Greene doesn’t make an explicit connection to the current debates about how one determines gender, it’s difficult to read this essay without thinking about that echo.

Greene also explores cultures most of us aren’t aware of, such as balloon twisters, which goes well beyond birthday party clowns. Greene volunteers as a model for Laura, who uses balloons to recreate the iconic Marilyn Monroe dress from The Seven Year Itch. While attending the convention where Laura crafts the dress from balloons, Greene meditates on balloon twisting as a symbolic art — “A balloon sculpture is always, obviously, made of balloons. And yet it is always, obviously, more than that.” — as well as personal space. She points out how willing people were to touch her balloons in ways that are inappropriate otherwise, with one man putting his hand on a balloon representing her breast.

As with all good essays in the tradition of Montaigne, the seeming focus of Greene’s essays is both subject and springboard for meditations on what it means to move through this world, both natural and human-created. Her curiosity leads her to places many writers never arrive.

No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene. Tin House, 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: For Today by Carolyn Hembree

For Today by Carolyn Hembree book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In For Today, Carolyn Hembree chronicles the life of a woman navigating the challenges of the sandwich generation — simultaneously caring for her aging father and nurturing her young daughter. Throughout the first quarter of the collection, Hembree draws upon traditional forms such as the sonnet crown, villanelle, and haiku to explore the nature of responsibility and the complex interplay of time. Those poetic structures invite readers to consider how form reflects the weight and nuances of modern life’s emotional “cargo.” The poet poses a compelling question: What form can truly encapsulate the pressures of living amid competing demands? The poet’s answer takes shape in a dynamic, en plein air-style walking poem that maps the tender and evolving relationship between the woman and her daughter, all set against the culturally rich backdrop of their New Orleans neighborhood.

The title poem, spanning sixty-one pages and comprising the collection’s remaining three-quarters, immerses readers in a near real-time narrative detailing the woman’s dynamic internal and external experiences. Here, we witness mother and daughter as they stroll their vibrant neighborhood, play an I-Spy-like game, and delight in the small details of life. The mother’s thoughts also wander to weighty concerns, such as an ill friend, climate disasters, and lockdown drills. Memories of her father merge with reflections on influential poets, like Inger Christensen and Rainer Maria Rilke, prompting her own poetic inquiry and responsiveness.

This expansive poem resists controlling containment and neat endings, instead insisting on a journey that allows tangents and moves “onward.” The poem embraces the totality of existence, affirming that every experience holds significance and deserves recognition. By doing so, the poem “sings exultant,” showing “poetry’s long tongue / licking life’s contours” of love and grief. Hembree’s desire “to touch everything, at once” is an acknowledgment of the intricate beauty of life. For Today reminds us that in the tapestry of life, every thread matters.

For Today by Carolyn Hembree. Louisiana State University 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Book of Kin by Darius Atefat-Peckham

Book of Kin by Darius Atefat-Peckham book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In his debut, award-winning collection, Book of Kin, Darius Atefat-Peckham explores the “haunting” intersections of his life as an “only child of grief” with a mother he describes as someone “who will die, many times, over” in life and imagination. Atefat-Peckham’s poems are infused with “[hush] music” that oscillates between “breaking” and “accumulation.” His poem “They Wake Me” poignantly asks, “How many beloveds in me will I survive?” This unveils the dialogue between the poet and the fragments of self that emerge from grief. Both poet and son “want / To see what, at the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.”

Book of Kin has three sections: “The First Sound,” “Book of Kin,” and “The Outer Reaches.” Each section seeks kinship with the mother and brother Atefat-Peckham lost in a car accident, his Iranian heritage and language, his artistic life and “perennial living.”

Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is arresting, self-aware. The narrative and emotion in the poems are intricately tied to formal choices. For example, in the poem “Heathcliffs,” the poet often makes line breaks on words with glottal-stopped consonants, such as “lost,” “meant,” “wait,” “night,” and “want.” This end-word consonance creates a repeated plosive sound, evoking themes of fragility and mortality. Right-justified poems convey the “staggering” loss of family members. Concrete poems shaped like portholes offer an “ethereal lens” to other realms of consciousness. Bracketed words within poems connect to reveal additional meanings and new perspectives.

Each line of Atefat-Peckham’s poetry is wrought with celebration and sorrow, a combination reminiscent of both the poetry of Rumi and Susan Atefat-Peckham, the poet’s mother. Book of Kin serves as both a mourning ritual and a celebratory hymn, “teaching” readers “something about worship” while inviting us into an intimate conversation between spiritual, physical, and artistic realms.

Book of Kin by Darius Atefat-Peckham. Autumn House Press, October 2024. Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize as selected by January Gill O’Neil.

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 :: You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty, longtime anti-poverty activist and Presbyterian pastor, Liz Theoharis, a veteran of the welfare rights movement and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and writer-organizer Noam Sandweiss-Back, have written a powerful denunciation of the established truism that tells us that “the poor will always be with us.” Instead, the pair offer a detailed and often-poignant look at the ways poor people have, for many decades, mobilized on their own behalf to win respect and demand access to high-quality public education, healthcare, affordable housing, and other family supports. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part theological discussion, and part policy guide, zeroes in on wide-ranging organizing efforts and charts strategies, tactics, and goals used in grassroots campaigns. While not every effort they present was successful, the lessons learned make the book an essential primer for anyone working for progressive political change.

That said, while there are no formulas for movement building, Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back believe that anti-poverty efforts should mobilize around human rights and demand political, civil, and economic equity. Moreover, the book argues that all three are necessary components of human dignity – or should be. They also favor multi-issue campaigns, writing that it is imperative to integrate the “fight for food, water, clothing, housing, health care, and good jobs…Our power rests not in any one issue but in the multiplicity of our demands and communities coming together.” Finally, the authors remind readers of the necessity of hope. As they conclude, “successful movements never just curse the darkness; they offer new ways of illuminating the future.”

They are wise words. And despite the fact that the Right is currently ascendant, neither Theoharis nor Sandweiss-Back seems discouraged. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” they conclude. Time will tell how this will play out.

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back. Beacon Press, April 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 :: Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer

Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

On one level, the title of Pico Iyer’s latest book, Aflame, refers to the wildfires in California that have taken at least one of his family’s homes and threatens the Hermitage, a monastery he visits quite often for solitude. On another, though, it describes the monks and other seekers of solitude he meets at the Hermitage over the more than three decades he’s been visiting, as they are alive in a way he doesn’t see in many people.

Iyer’s work is not concerned with chronology, as he doesn’t provide the readers with specific dates or times of his visits. Instead, as one might expect from a meditation on silence and solitude, he isn’t concerned with the way the world moves outside of the Hermitage. In fact, he says little about his life when he’s traveling for work or home with his wife and children, referencing them from time to time, but centering his thoughts on the monastery and the interactions he has there.

He presents the monks and other seekers as human, not saints, all wanting only to learn from a retreat from the concerns of the world. Iyer himself spends much of his time reflecting on what he’s reading, but, also, somewhat ironically, talking with the other people who are there. He develops deep friendships, intimacy that develops from sharing the solitude as much from those conversations.

The Hermitage is always in danger of being destroyed or even lacking the funds to continue, but the monks don’t seem that concerned. They know, and Iyer learns, that the lessons they’ve all learned will follow them elsewhere, should they have to leave. Iyer ultimately understands that, while he needs solitude, he can see the world differently no matter where he is, if he only continues to pay attention.

Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer. Riverhead Books, January 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

Book Review :: The Dove that Didn’t Return by Yael S. Hacohen

The Dove that Didn't Return by Yael S. Hacohen book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her debut collection, The Dove That Didn’t Return, Yael S. Hacohen delivers a poignant exploration of her lived experiences as a female commander in the Israeli Defense Forces from the front lines of the Middle East conflict. Hacohen’s poems scrutinize the nature of warfare, interrogate the concepts of violence and peace, navigate “a different shade / of Judaism,” and traverse the fine line between humanity and brutality to highlight the “constellations of combat” endured by both soldiers and civilians.

In the genre of war poetry often dominated by male voices, The Dove That Didn’t Return stands out by presenting the unique perspective of a female soldier who has “shot an M-16.” Hacohen weaves her personal experiences of military service with biblical and rabbinic themes, framing her reality as she seeks her “own olive tree… own truth, / …own kind of country.”

Many of the poems reimagine biblical narratives. “Pillar of Cloud” reflects on the fears surrounding military service, and “Moriah,” a conversation with Isaac, raises questions about sacrifice. “The Western Wall” contemplates whether the wall is merely “a wall, / nothing more,” a place to “bang… [a] head,” or a site of prayer.

The collection’s title references the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, where the dove bearing an olive branch typically symbolizes peace and hope. However, in the title poem, Hacohen critically reflects on the meaning behind the dove not returning, asking: What peace can exist in isolation? Who suffers from the consequences of war? This inquiry captures the complexities of striving for peace in an unstable region.

While grappling with the complexities of establishing a state in a land also home to others, Yael S. Hacohen’s narrative, declarative poems address the complex realities of family and duty, faith and sacrifice, war and peace without the pretense of easy resolution.

The Dove that Didn’t Return by Yael S. Hacohen. Holy Cow! Press, June 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 :: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne

Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Laynie Browne pays homage to veteran poet Mei-Mei Berssenbruge in her latest poetry collection, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand. While eschewing Berssenbrugge’s fascination with light and quantum physics, many of the poems in this book feature the long lines and the phenomenological focus on which the elder poet relies. The resulting poems idolize and interact with Brussenbruge’s work while adding a fine addition to Browne’s oeuvre.

Poems featuring long lines of wrapped text appear throughout the collection, but the title poem of Browne’s second section, “Euphoric Rose,” forms the heart of the book. It consists of fourteen poem sections over fifteen pages, each with a first line that builds on words from the title poem of Berssenbrugge’s iconic Hello, the Roses (New Directions, 2013). Shorter and acrostic poems relating to the topic round out the section.

Though Browne borrows in this collection, her own unique experiences and interests still feature. A four-section late poem titled “The Self-Combed Woman” follows Browne’s feminist leanings alluding to a “cultural phenomenon of marriage resistance” in China’s Pearl River Delta, eventually abrogated by the rise of the Communist Party. The poetry in this collection is beautiful and evocative, but readers may need to work in understanding. Those who enjoy a poetic challenge or are fans of Berssenbrugge’s work and style will enjoy it, but casual readers may falter. Still, I recommend it.

Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne. Omnidawn Publishing, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: earthwork by Jill Khoury

earthwork by Jill Khoury book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In earthwork, Jill Khoury’s second poetry collection, a sight-impaired daughter navigates her complex relationship with her chronically ill mother. Following the mother’s death, the daughter confronts the lasting impact of having a critical, impatient, and judgmental mother while also tending her “holy ardor” and grief.

earthwork unfolds in three parts. The first section begins near the time of the mother’s “can’t eat / won’t eat” and her eventual death. The second section returns to the daughter’s childhood, providing the historical context by “rattling the traces.” In the third section, readers witness the daughter’s “heptahedron” of grief and her “going a-hunting / for the part of [her] / that can live through this.” Adjacent to its exploration of “a bad luck message / encoded in the genes,” the poems consider the inheritance of failure among women — how a mother’s inability to be loving can lead to a daughter’s struggle to love herself. Additionally, they address broader societal questions: What constitutes female failure, and by whom is it designated? Does this prevent open discussions of abuse?

The emotional depth of the poems is marked by specific images and recurring punctuation on the page. Each punctuation choice contains a contrapuntal argument. Forward slashes suggest separation or alternative. Brackets suggest isolation or interjection. Caesura enacts breaking hearts or bonds. Central images also contain counterpoints. The recurring figure of a horse symbolizes both the mother’s “rigid rein” and the daughter’s free spirit. The collection’s title acts as a “metonymic vessel,” representing not only the mother’s life and the daughter’s life, but also the clay pots the mother created, a funeral urn, and even the poetry collection itself.

Written in all lowercase, Jill Khoury’s poems strive to “break the code” of poetic, familial, and societal conventions. They avoid easy explanations and quick resolutions, recognizing the ongoing nature of grief.

earthwork by Jill Khoury. Switchback Books, February 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 :: Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood by Angela Denker

Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood by Angela Denker book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

It’s no secret that many mass shootings in the United States have been carried out by white men whose fury has been bolstered by Christian nationalist organizations and websites. How and why this hateful worldview has enticed so many young men is at the center of Angela Denker’s latest book, Disciples of White Jesus. Denker, an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as a journalist, is an adroit storyteller. And while the book focuses more on individual examples of teens and young adults who’ve been lured by rightwing hate groups than it does on probing how denominations can undermine these ideologies, it is nonetheless a valuable contribution to understanding boys and men as both victim and menace.

Denker is well-versed in the lies and misrepresentations that ground Christian nationalism, including the near-universal mainstream Christian presentation of Jesus as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, hunk who is violent, macho, and tough. “Most pernicious,” she writes, “is that weakness is to be avoided at all costs, that showing vulnerability and emotion is a recipe for disaster, a potential upheaval in a society that has placed white Christian men at the top of a teetering house of cards.”

For white males who are themselves teetering, or who see themselves as outcasts, feelings of isolation or shame typically lead to depression. Predictably, websites that blame feminism, DEI, or CRT can appeal to their perceived sense of entitlement and victimization. Add in reinforcing messages from racist-sexist-homophobic-xenophobic evangelical and fundamentalist preachers, and the mix is potent. Still, it’s in finding like-minded others that their youthful fury is stoked. As one former skinhead told Denker, he joined a hate group for the camaraderie; the politics came later. It’s a valuable insight for anyone working with disaffected young people.

All told, Disciples of White Jesus is a crash course in the marketing of toxic masculinity for white supremacist and Christian nationalist ends. It’s a powerful indictment.

Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood by Angela Denker. Broadleaf Books, March 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 :: Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future by Emile Suotonye DeWeaver

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine by Emile Suotonye DeWeaver book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Emile Suotonye DeWeaver was 13, he dropped out of junior high school and began selling drugs. By 18, he’d murdered a man.

This egregious crime led to DeWeaver’s conviction, and he was sentenced to 67 years to life. It was a sobering event, but this son of a respected Oakland medical doctor determined that incarceration would not be the end of his story. Instead, he would “write himself out of prison.” As unlikely as it sounds, DeWeaver succeeded, and after 21 years of incarceration, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted his sentence in 2014. The reason? As the co-founder of the first Society of Professional Journalists chapter in a prison, his work as a reporter for the San Quentin News, and his co-creation of a group called Prison Renaissance, the state determined that he had been “rehabilitated.”

Ghosts in the Criminal Justice Machine is DeWeaver’s deeply felt story, part memoir and part polemic. Although the former is more effective than the latter, he clearly situates the perpetuation of white supremacy at the heart of carceral and “law-and-order” policies and cogently outlines the ways the criminal legal system uses prison-based educational and recreational programs to keep racist, hierarchical power structures in place. Similarly, his delineation of the ways policing fails to keep communities safe is well-wrought and provocative.

Not everything in the book is as effective, though, and his depiction of a restorative justice model to help perpetrators come to terms with the impact of their crimes can best be read as aspirational. Still, DeWeaver is a terrific writer and bold thinker. His self-reflection and observations about prison, policing, criminal injustice, and the foundational racism that undergirds many US social policies make Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine a valuable contribution to debates about personal responsibility. Moreover, by showcasing the limits of individual, rather than systemic, change, the book makes a clear argument for rethinking crime, punishment and retribution.

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future by Emile Suotonye DeWeaver. The New Press, May 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 :: Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries by Abigail Leonard

Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries by Abigail Leonard book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

In Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, Journalist Abigail Leonard, a mother of three, blends the personal and political in her astute look at how motherhood is supported (or not) in four countries: Finland, Kenya, Japan, and the United States. Her up-close-and-personal portrayals of four cisgender women track the physical toll of childbirth, post-delivery adjustment, and relationship strain. The result is powerful. “Many of the big decisions, like how much time to spend with the children and how to divide the emotional and physical labor with their partner, are heavily determined by the social structure of the place women give birth,” she writes.

Finland comes closest to an ideal, not only providing cost-free prenatal care that includes therapy to break intergenerational trauma in expectant moms but also utilizing midwives for most deliveries. During the birth itself, medication is promoted to reduce labor pain. Then, after the no-cost-to-them birth, moms like Anna get nearly a year of paid leave from their jobs; paid paternity leave is also encouraged. This has made Finland the only country in the industrialized world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers. Still, it’s not utopia, and Leonard chronicles the custody drama between Anna and Masa, her newborn’s dad.

That said, Anna has access to robust social supports, including professional daycare, which makes navigating single parenthood possible, if difficult. Nonetheless, compared to Chelsea in Kenya, Sarah in the US, and Tsukasa in Japan – mothers who have to juggle post-partum anxiety and depression with a relatively quick return to work – Finland seems like the gold standard. For the other three, the stress of unaffordable childcare, lack of breastfeeding support, and frustration with partners who either vanish or are clueless, makes this immersive portrayal heartbreaking, albeit compelling.

Sadly, Leonard notes that the visionary feminist goal of egalitarian parenting, a once prominent demand, remains unrealized. But we know what’s needed. While Four Mothers does not make policy recommendations, its case studies serve as a potent directive.

Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries by Abigail Leonard. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, May 2025 [pre-order available].

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 Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui

The Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The Dissident Club, a graphic memoir by award-winning Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui, opens with his attempted kidnapping by military officers in 2018, presumably under orders from government officials who were displeased with his near-constant reporting about government corruption. As someone on the country’s “Kill List,” Siddiqui had long attracted official enmity. But this beautifully illustrated and evocative book is more than an account of Siddiqui’s political resistance: It is also a deeply felt reflection on his childhood and a potent critique of fundamentalist religious viewpoints and restrictions.

As the oldest son of deeply conservative religious parents, Siddiqui began life in Saudi Arabia, then returned to Pakistan where his parents attempted to keep him and his siblings from Western media and culture. The book chronicles Siddiqui’s attempts to come of age — drinking, smoking weed, and hiding a Shiite girlfriend from his Sunni parents — and asserting his independence by refusing to work in his father’s business. Not surprisingly, this took a toll, as his family never accepted his vocational choice or lifestyle.

It’s a sad, if not uncommon, denouement, but one that comes with a relatively happy ending.

Shortly after the kidnapping attempt, Siddiqui, his wife, and son emigrated to France where he set up The Dissident Club, a thriving Paris-based gathering place and bar for refugees and their supporters. The Dissident Club tells the site’s story, along the way zeroing in on religious hypocrisy, the War on Terror, the uses and misuses of propaganda, and the ways many government officials promote repressive policies for personal, financial, and professional gain. It’s a powerful indictment and an ode to free expression.

The Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui; co-author illus. Hubert Maury; trans. David Homel. Arsenal Pulp Press, April 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 :: Lemonade by Catalina Vargas Tovar

Lemonade by Catalina Vargas Tovar book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Lemonade, the captivating chapbook by Catalina Vargas Tovar, attentively translated by Juliana Borrero, invites readers on an ecological inquiry that “is not a book of poetry” but an engaging “Paranormal Investigation.” At its core, this work explores the enigmatic presence of a mountain from Bogotá’s eastern range. Tovar describes the mountain as a sentinel that “keeps watch… observes / attunes.” Then notes its geological, hydrological, and transformative powers; the mountain “separates this plateau / from the world” and “absorbs water / in excess / turns it into language.” In contrast to the mountain’s enduring existence and transformative powers, we — “a great ensemble of / disoriented / out of tune / apocalyptic / crows” — illustrate the fleeting and “incoherent” nature of humanity.

Tovar’s exploration focuses on relationships between humans and the land, presenting the mountain through a feminine lens: “she… / receives / compensates / transforms.” The collective human presence is conveyed through a first-person plural perspective, presumably including the speaker: “we will be mummies / piled on mummies,” the “ghosts / that drink lemonade on the shore of a Black Sea.” The complexity of our existence and the mountain’s supernatural essence can only be “understood through investigation.”

Parts paranormal, philosophical, and poetic, Lemonade is a vibrant site for experimental conversation “under the sun of climate change” where “we [have] turned to shadows.” The chapbook endeavors two things: To “undo the spell / move in reverse”; To cast a new spell that encourages readers to listen to the land with fresh ears, to “see without tongue.”

Lemonade reflects Catalina Vargas Tovar’s inquiry into the interplay of ecology and culture while also challenging readers to consider how these elements shape our own ways of listening to the “promise” of the land where we live.

Lemonade by Catalina Vargas Tovar; translated by Juliana Borrero. Ugly Duckling Presse, November 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 :: The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight book cover image

Review by Catherine Hayes

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Emma Knight’s debut novel, is a powerful and compelling observation of womanhood in the early 21st century. Knight explores, a time when the cultural definition of the term womanhood and women’s roles in society largely came into question after the rejection of archaic boundaries and restrictions in the face of second wave feminism in the latter half of the 20th century.

The story follows Penelope “Pen” Winters, a first year international student at the University of Edinburgh who serves as the central protagonist of the novel; Christina Lennox, a family matriarch; and Alice, Pen’s friend and fellow classmate at university. Through each character, Knight explores the silent pressures, demands, and expectations that society places on women through her examination of the institution of marriage and romantic relationships alongside the power dynamics between men and women in these scenarios. Each of the three women undergoes an individual journey of self-discovery and empowerment as they begin to recognize the restrictions and prejudices that have been placed on them simply because of their gender. Yet Knight skillfully brings these three storylines into conversation with one another as each woman plays an active role in the others’ journeys, making for a moving portrayal of female friendship and support.

A truly memorable debut novel that is intelligent and character-driven, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is an important story that sheds light on the suffocating nature of society’s archaic gender prejudices. In the end, Knight emphasizes how each woman has the power and capability to define herself and her life outside the boundaries of these definitions.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight. Pamela Dorman Books, January 2025.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes graduated from Bridgewater State University with her master’s in English and currently lives in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Blood & Thunder: Musings of the Art of Medicine, MER Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, NewPages. She can be contacted on Twitter at @Catheri91642131.

Book Review :: The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst

The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Boyhood of Cain, Michael Amherst’s debut novel, tells the story of Daniel, a middle-school-aged boy who is trying to understand his place in school, his family, and the world. Like his biblical namesake, Daniel feels like he is in a lion’s den, but it’s one he doesn’t understand, as he is not popular at school, and he has no respect for either of his parents. His father is the former head of the school he attended, but he mismanaged the finances and so left the school in disgrace. Daniel’s mother struggles with depression, eventually leading to a period of hospitalization.

Like the biblical Cain Amherst alludes to in the title, Daniel is an outcast at school, as his metaphorical offerings don’t live up to the quality of the other students, especially Philip, his friend and rival. Mr. Miller, an art teacher, initially takes Daniel into individual lessons, possibly because he sees potential in his art, but then he includes Philip, as well. Daniel goes from feeling like one of the chosen to being on the periphery again, where he has spent most of his school days. It’s clear to the reader that Mr. Miller is not a good person, but Daniel seeks his approval, as he doesn’t have any other part of life to provide him with that support.

The distance between Daniel and the reader is the strength of the book. Daniel’s narration is simple, given his age, but the reader often sees the reality of Daniel’s life in ways that he cannot. When Daniel talks about wanting to be special — even comparing himself to Jesus, at one point — the reader sees him as a typical child, solipsistic and narrow-minded. However, the reader also feels sympathy for Daniel, as most of us have had similar experiences as children, times when we didn’t understand ourselves or the world, but thought we knew more than anybody around us. Thus, while the narration is child-like, the emotions are as human as any most readers have experienced.

The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst. 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: d–sorientation by Charleen McClure

d–sorientation by Charlene McClure book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In the title of Charleen McClure’s debut poetry collection, d–sorientation, the absence of the letter “i” enacts a loss of orientation to self in relationship to other, time, and place. The disorientation explored in McClure’s poems primarily stems from the poet’s mother’s illness, which not only threatens her mother’s life but also disrupts the daughter’s/poet’s sense of grounding: she is “the woman / in the snow of [her] mother’s / / cancer—” As a result, there is a reversal of roles between mother and daughter which leads to a reorientation within caregiving that highlights a legacy of devotion among generations of helping women, “the casava women / we come from.”

To capture the essence of the threats to orientation, McClure crafts a lyric, elegiac, fragmented, and unstopped poetry that utilizes subtext, negation, and erasure. The choice of erasure is particularly striking and resonant. As cancer imposes its own form of erasure on her mother—something the daughter cannot prevent — the poet asserts her artistic power through a blackout of William Fox’s 1792 pamphlet, “An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West Indian Sugar and Rum.” This poetic approach creates a compelling parallelism between personal experience and societal issues concerning the treatment of women and people of color. The approach also adroitly subverts a narrative of dominant culture while pulling its critique by non-dominant culture into relief, challenging the very notion of “negation.”

That is what McClure’s “words do”! They follow Ezra Pound’s imperative to “make it new.” The poet makes something new out of the givens — historical, physical, relational, and gendered elements — and in that gesture, acknowledges artistic and female fertility.

The reader of d–sorientation, having followed “the threads” of Charleen McClure’s “forlorn music,” arrives at “the edge of sweetness” and is nourished by the possibility of what “might mend.”

d–sorientation by Charleen McClure. BOA Editions, 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.

Erratum 3/26/25: The author’s name, Charleen, had been misspelled as ‘Charlene’ and may still appear this way in areas where it cannot be redacted.

Book Review :: Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Blood Test by Charles Baxter book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Charles Baxter has subtitled, Blood Test, his latest novel, “A Comedy,” and it lives up to that name, both in the sense that it is a humorous book, and the reader is never really concerned about an unhappy ending. The title refers to a test that Brock Hobson — the main character whose name everybody mispronounces — takes while at the doctor. It comes from a shadowy organization that promises to predict one’s future behavior, a joke in and of itself, as Hobson is an insurance salesman who takes no risks and lives a predictable life.

His two children suggest that he could begin breaking the law at will, even murdering somebody, given that the test results say that he will, at some point, break a law. Thus, they tell him he could argue that he had no choice in the matter. The shadowy organization even has him buy an insurance policy that retains legal counsel for when he does break the law.

The person Hobson wants to kill is Burt, the man who is now in a relationship with Cheryl, Hobson’s ex-wife. Burt seemingly has nothing redeeming about him, save for being handsome and in great shape, and he’s taken to calling Hobson and Cheryl’s son slurs because of his sexual orientation. Hobson ultimately does confront Burt about that and other issues, leading to a physical altercation and, ultimately, a type of duel.

On one hand, Baxter is raising questions about freedom and whether it can lead us to perform actions we wouldn’t otherwise undertake, and he might even be criticizing America’s reliance on guns, among other issues. However, the novel doesn’t seem to take itself seriously enough for that. Instead, Baxter invites the reader to follow along with Brock Hobson as he tries to figure out how to navigate his life as it has become more interesting after the blood test, and nobody knows where he’s going, even if a test tells him.

Blood Test by Charles Baxter. Pantheon Books, October 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: The Echoes by Evie Wyld

The Echoes by Evie Wyld book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Evie Wyld’s latest novel takes place in three different time periods, which she refers to as Before, After, and Then. The Before and After section focus on Hannah and Max, a couple living in England, with the Before and After referring to Max’s death. The Before sections come from Hannah’s point of view, while Max—as a ghost—is the centerpiece of the After chapters. The Then sections go back to Hannah’s childhood in Australia, showing what led her to England and to who she currently is.

Those Then sections relate Hannah’s childhood in The Echoes, a place that exists on the graveyard of what used to be a “school” for Indigenous children where the white family running the institution abused, beat, and sometimes killed them. That past echoes through the experiences of the white family that now live there, as well, especially in Hannah and her sister Rachel’s Uncle Tone (short for Anthony).

Some Australian writers and thinkers have criticized Wyld’s handling of this section of the novel, critiquing her knowledge of Australian culture, but also in her supposed equating of the two types of trauma. I read the novel, especially the title, as an attempt to show how the whites are often oblivious to or indifferent to the suffering that has come before them, focused only on their own suffering, not as people for the reader to emulate. However, I’ll also admit my shortcomings in both perspective and knowledge.

In the Before and After sections, Hannah and Max’s relationship struggles to develop as fully as it could, largely because of the trauma Hannah endured before coming to England. While it’s clear they love each other, Hannah hasn’t revealed much about her past, even hiding a decision to have an abortion recently in their relationship. Characters’ decisions echo throughout time, as the novel also meditates on grief and loss, as Max’s ghost hovers in their flat for years after Hannah leaves, seeing her only one more time, understanding all they have lost.

The Echoes by Evie Wyld. Alfred A. Knopf, 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Roisín O’Donnell’s debut novel tells the story of Ciara, a woman who seems to have the perfect life: an attractive husband who has a steady job, enabling her and their two children to live a comfortable life. However, the reader discovers quite quickly that Ryan is not what he seems, as he emotionally and sexually abuses her. Readers see little of that abuse firsthand, especially the assaults, but they clearly see the effect of that abuse on Ciara.

She is finally able to leave Ryan, but her life for much of the next year is precarious, as there is little housing in Dublin for her and her children. She ends up in a hotel, with little money, trying to find a better place to live and a job to support her children. While her family offers to help her, she—like many survivors of abuse—is reluctant to take it. However, the people she meets in the hotel (and one brave civil servant who meets her outside of the office to tell her the truth about the reality of finding housing) help keep her from completely falling through the gaping holes of the social safety nets.

Throughout the novel, Ciara questions if she is making the right decision by leaving, especially when she gives birth to their third child and returns with him to the hotel. Ryan’s years of abuse have made Ciara afraid of him and unsure of herself, so she has moments where she allows him back into their lives, partly because of the legal system, but partly because of what he has done to her psyche.

O’Donnell reveals the realities of abuse that is more emotional in nature and how it causes a person to change, as well as the problems with the systems that should help women in such situations. However, there are still moments of joy where Ciara remembers who she once was and who she still can be.

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell. Algonquin 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Uché Blackstock’s memoir begins by talking about her mother, who was also a doctor and who served as the inspiration for Blackstock and her sister’s both pursuing degrees in medicine from Harvard. Her mother died in her early forties, but Blackstock continues looking back for what she can learn from how her mother lived.

The middle part of the memoir focuses on Blackstock’s medical education, where she not only encounters overt racism, but the much more subtle racism laced throughout the healthcare industry, including some beliefs about African Americans that remain from the 1800s. She eventually finds what should be her dream job at NYU only for her to continue to struggle against the racism built into such institutions.

She transitions into work that we would now call DEI, but she receives no meaningful support. In fact, she learns that people want the cover of such offices, but don’t want any meaningful change. COVID-19 impacts her work life rather dramatically, as she spends much more time working in hospitals at that point, and she quickly notices how many of the patients look more like her than she is used to seeing.

Ultimately, she leaves academic medicine, shifting her focus to health equity to try to counter the racism within healthcare systems. She questions both the legacy of racism/slavery in such systems, as well as her legacy from her mother, wondering about the choices her mother made in a system that was even more overtly racist than the one Blackstock finds herself in. She ends the book with direct suggestions to a wide variety of audiences of how they can begin the work of making healthcare more equitable, leaving the reader with a sense that there are solutions, as opposed to leaving them with feelings of despair.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock. Penguin Books, 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: (Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Education professor Soyoung Park’s latest book, (Re)Imagining Inclusions for Children of Color with Disabilities, is grounded in her direct observations of public, elementary-level “special education” programs in California, New York, and Texas. Throughout, she lambasts the general segregation and isolation of children into separate and unequal classrooms and offers a critique of the pervasive biases that label some children — especially those who are neither white nor English-dominant — as uneducable and inferior.

But the book’s strength is not in its unraveling of the link between ableism and racism. Rather, it rests with its focus on teachers who do the seemingly impossible: quiet aggressive, disinterested, and overwrought children. Park showcases how these master educators make room for unexpected actions and revelations; allow students to develop their unique intellectual curiosities; and center the development of relationships between teacher and student and between the students themselves.

Reading these anecdotal examples is revelatory — and inspiring — particularly because the book is being released as federal cutbacks to public education are looming. Nonetheless, thanks to the concrete examples that are presented, the text offers well-grounded insights into best practices for teaching kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. It’s an excellent model of what should happen in every special ed classroom.

At the same time, because the book never addresses the distinct needs of children who are deaf, blind, or severely intellectually impaired, it is not a one-size-fits-all reference. Still, teachers will learn a lot from the book and other readers will gain a profound appreciation of an often-denigrated profession.

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park. Harvard Education Press, March 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 :: Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The first two words of Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poetry, Heliotropia, are “I love.” The poet turns toward topics she deems “worth loving” — plant life, love life, and love poetry — like a sunflower moves in response to the sun. The collection’s strength and its risk are its “leaning into love.”

In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”

“I try not to be at war with memories
I teach myself that I can be my own divine agent
I practice surrender in the name of something I believe in”

Bandukwala’s poetry proactively cultivates intimate fellowship and appreciative practice. The poet knows her “path / is tenuous at best,” but makes a practice of “being alive” and determines “each day can hold one thing to love.”

In exploring “the subject / of love,” the poet acknowledges its dynamic, everchanging, and multifaceted nature. To illustrate that love is “constantly changing” and encompasses multiple definitions, the poet references poetry, painting, music, cinema, Star Trek, and The Marigold Tarot Deck. Her response to the perspectives of notable artists, such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, American poet Ellen Bass, and Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, contributes a unique framework for understanding types of love such as eros, philia, philautia, and agape.

Bandukwala writes from love and to love, believing that “even at its most difficult / love is worth loving.” Heliotropia celebrates her personal love of galaxies, stars, flowers, kisses, and language. For Manahil Bandukwala, “There are more love poems to write.”

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala. Brick Books, 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 :: The Upstate by Lindsay Turner

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The title of Lindsay Turner’s second collection of poetry, The Upstate, locates the poems and the reader in the northwesternmost area of South Carolina. For those unfamiliar with this region, the term “upstate” may evoke other meanings such as standing, lifted, constructed, ready. These adjectives suggest the complicated realities of geographic capitalism and resource exploitation prevalent in American landscapes. From references to “clearcut” forests to a “paper mill,” the haunting essence of the “land unanswerable beneath the haze—”

Despite hazy disorientation, Turner invites us to examine what is in our “peripherals.” As “a person who believes in the value of intelligence,” she dons a headlamp and attempts to “find the verb for how you lost” and articulates the destruction of a place and people that she witnesses. But Turner does not write “at a remove”; she is our accomplice. And we are hers, because the crisis is ours. “We all did it.”

“The question is who does your money come from
The question is whose loss
The question is whose loves are torn like wet paper for your money
Whose lines are crossed by it
Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable
Because of your money”

As Turner seeks orientation and perspective to “get at the truth of it,” she climbs “up a mountain” — another interpretation of “upstate”— and what she sees is devastating: “The only being on the rocky outcrop, some things present in their outlines while the others sink into the sea. The other things dissolve in toxic fog. The other things are sold in pieces so small you couldn’t recognize.” These days “heavy days,” struggling with what it means to live in a “bleak” state.

In The Upstate, Lindsay Turner “has a different song about being out of place.” A downstate. She sings to us, “Whose lives are rubbled,” acknowledging how “distanced” we are from “the garden.”

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner. The University of Chicago Press, October 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders

How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Chad Sanders lays out his premise in the opening line of the opening chapter of his book: “This is my last time writing about race,” a line that echoes Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Sanders takes a different approach to come to some similar and relevant conclusions, as he talks about the trades he has to make in order for (mostly) white executives to listen to him and greenlight his projects.

Sanders works in the entertainment industry, as well as in writing, and he spends a significant part of the book talking about the unpaid or underpaid work he has done in order to try to make the connections he needs in order to succeed. Much of that work involves talking about race, almost always including racial trauma. The parts of the book where he focuses on that part of his career mirror Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television, with its portrayal of a Black woman trying to break into television writing.

Sanders also draws on his experience in Silicon Valley, which is strikingly similar to Hollywood, as well as conflict within the African American community, such as the debate over the Jack and Jill organization. By the end of the work, he reiterates that this will be his last time writing about race. However, he admits, “Unless I need the money again,” as he recognizes the realities of the world, even while critiquing them.

How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders. Simon & Schuster, 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De'Ath book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

With Bernadette Mayer’s record-keeping poetry and Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto by her side, Amy De’Ath offers Not a Force of Nature. Each of these feminist writers resists “acting in the spirit of the contract” and seeks a “release from form” imposed by systems of power.

De’Ath writes at the intersection of feminism and capitalism, poetry and critique. Conscious of class, gender, sexuality, and other capitalist categories and oppressive systems, De’Ath writes against a “culture of financial bullshit” and attempts to make room for “Different shades of grey.” She “state[s] categorically that [she does] not endorse / whatever it is / people don’t like about these others—”

Readers will recognize categories of form such as a sonnet and an email, but what if “work emails” are made sonnets? That may seem like a simple question, but the implications are complex, suggesting not only a subversion of written forms, but a change in categorical concept. De’Ath proposes this “alternative trajectory” of tradition and conformity to the reader without coercion. As she considers “changeable forms of praxis,” De’Ath shifts readers away from being passive consumers of her art to being active thinkers within it. That’s art! And an act of love! “Since LOve tackles DEbt, [De’Ath] will follow it to / the marrow.”

At the core, Amy De’Ath is a revolutionary, writing against narrow cultural and institutional parameters. She refuses to conform to economic systems of artistic reproduction. Instead, she writes poetry to “make a concept out of it,” enabling socio-political thinking and heart-poetic communication. She writes for “People who like [her]… don’t want to reproduce / Themselves that way or this way.” Amy De’Ath’s way vies for people “roaming free” and a poetry “made by human hands.”

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath. Futurepoem, Fall 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 :: Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff by Ali Smith book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The word gliff has a variety of definitions, one of which — now long since out of use — is “to make a slip in reading.” In that line, Ali Smith’s most recent novel seems a simple story, a dystopian tale about two children, Briar and Rose, who are unverifiables, people who are living off the grid, after their mother and (maybe) step-father go missing.

Along the way, they meet Colon (that seems to really be his name) who has a horse that Rose tries to buy, a horse she names Gliff. They also live with other unverifiables for a brief period of time. Smith never explains what has happened in the broader society to lead to whatever dystopian world now exists, but the monitoring certainly feels like something that could happen in any society today (there are also references throughout to Brave New World, though Smith isn’t concerned with the same questions Huxley was, as she’s writing about a different world than he could imagine).

It’s also never clear what Briar and Rose’s mother did that would lead to her being removed from the society or fleeing the society to avoid that removal, but Briar clearly doesn’t fit into the gender binary of this world. Smith doesn’t mention how they present their gender for much of the novel, but they ultimately encounter the world outside of their community of unverifiables, a situation that pushes Briar to choose one side of the binary.

The reader gets to see a bit of that world, as Briar has a good job a few years after having to make that choice. Ultimately, though, they encounter somebody else, somebody with news about Rose that reminds Briar who they once were and who they might still be. Though this novel seems to cover “a short space of time; a moment,” possibly only offering “a passing view; a glance, glimpse” of this world (other definitions for gliff), Smith clearly conveys the oppressive views of those who seek to impose their ideas — especially about gender and heteronormativity — on others, but she also reminds readers that there are ways to resist.

Gliff by Ali Smith. Pantheon 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Corner Office by Susan Hahn

Corner Office by Susan Hahn book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Susan Hahn’s Corner Office features the dramatis personae: Earth, Man, and Woman. Each character “pines” for what has been lost. For Earth, that’s “pastures” and “seasons.” For Man, it’s his corner office and the status it conferred. For Woman, who once had a corner office that was later “sliced in half, it’s more complicated.

It may be troubling to a feminist, but for a while in the unfolding drama, Woman “pines” for Man, “pray[ing] each night that he’ll change— / spin only around [her].” Eventually, Woman decides “not / to call him, or anyone, but to exist / not inside the clutter of others’ thoughts, / or corner offices and those who mourn them.” Phew!

Hahn presses her Man and Woman against the thin wall between gender stereotypes and archetypes, highlighting tensions between capitalism’s professional hierarchy and the patriarchy’s gender roles. His office furniture “bubble-wrapped,” Man soothes himself with the idea of having “seven different pairs / of breasts in one week—new moons / circling [his] face.” Man views women primarily as sexual objects, a “substitute” mother, or a therapist. That artistic choice carries ethical risks; stereotypical portrayals of men and women in society and art can perpetuate misogyny.

Hahn takes another artistic and ethical risk in having Earth speak in first person: “I cannot seem to stop / the injuries inflicted upon my surface.” While this utterance is moving, anthropomorphizing Earth risks reducing the planet to a vessel filled with human rationality. Early in the book, Earth asks, “How did it come to this?” A reader could argue that the human perception of Earth as a metonymic and metaphoric figure underlies climate crises.
Hahn’s Man and Earth lose power. But Hahn’s Woman emerges as the most nuanced, sympathetic character, ultimately finding freedom in the metaphorical “open field / of a poem.” The corner office is hers!

Corner Office by Susan Hahn. Word Poetry, 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

In The Infernal Machine, Steven Johnson tells a story of explosive political violence, boosted in the late 19th century by Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite (later dubbed “infernal machines” by the press), and culminating in the U.S. Red Scare arrests and deportations of 1919-20. While some of the actors are well-known to history, such as anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with their eventual persecutor, J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson also follows lesser-known creators and early adopters of modern policing techniques, like fingerprint analysis and bomb disposal, to combat the threat.

Following the destruction trail of dynamite, Johnson shows how Nobel’s invention was soon adapted by radicals opposed to oppression and the capitalist order. It featured increasingly in political violence from the high-profile assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, to the U.S. organized labor campaigns around the century’s turn, the intimidating blasts of the extortionist Black Hand in the aughts, and the prominent Italian anarchist bombing wave that swept the U.S. in 1919. Johnson weaves accounts of anarchist events from the writings of Goldman and Berkman with the creation of modern police surveillance techniques to provide an even-handed and satisfying account from both sides.

While some readers may bristle at the foundation of a surveillance state that continues to flourish, Johnson tactfully acknowledges these perils while providing the compelling reasons for its creation. Beginning his story in the Russian “old country,” Johnson returns there after Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other leading “alien anarchists” are deported in December 1919 to revolutionary Russia and its nascent civil war. However, the U.S. revolutions in both political violence and state control would continue to shape our future.

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson. Crown, May 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online journal of poetry and poetics, focusing on chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Adroit Journal, Jacket2, The Rumpus and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

“Did you check the box?” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks while celebrating a new granddaughter in the preface to his latest book. The pleasure he derives from his son-in-law’s having checked the Black box on the newborn girl’s birth certificate feels bittersweet, though. As a “race man,” he wants the girl to take pride in the heritage of Black America; one in which he’s played a significant role in sharing. Still, he also knows she’s now in a more insidious box, despite her 87.5% European ancestry, containing the fraught baggage of Black American history.

Drawing from his Intro to African American Studies course at Harvard, Gates delivers a real education in The Black Box: Writing the Race. While it provides an excellent overview of Black American thought from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. De Bois to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Gates goes deeper than how things have appeared to outsiders. He guides readers through different ways Black writers have approached escaping from the negative aspects of the box with strong, sometimes conflicting, convictions.

The Black Box shows that “Black thought” has never been unified or unchallenged, a fact that’s unlikely to change. By understanding the different ways Black writers and thinkers have conceived of their own identities, however, we can better understand how to overcome the racial challenges our society still faces, including in our literature. Maybe understanding and compassion can help smooth the sharp edges of the box.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Penguin Press, March 2024. Paperback release March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Longtime activist and community organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel, founder and former executive director of the Groundswell Fund, a foundation dedicated to supporting grassroots, women of color-led organizations, has written an extraordinary book that merges memoir with matter-of-fact advice for advancing social change.

She begins by situating herself as the biracial daughter of a Sri Lankan father and white mother and describes what happened after she told her paternal family about being sexually abused by a relative. The family’s refusal to believe Vanessa caused her mom to flee; she ultimately opted to raise her only child in the mostly-white Pacific Northwest. The move caused a deep rupture for Vanessa, separating her from a Sri Lankan community that she had previously loved. Moreover, this foundational disruption has continued to indirectly impact her work as a progressive change agent and parent.

But other factors have also affected her, and the book offers a deconstruction of the ways she – indeed, all people – internalize racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, “isms” that can support or stymie community organizing. Concrete examples highlight the ways groups can be destroyed from within by allegations that a leader of color is “acting white” if they demand punctuality, good grammar, and productivity. While this may be seen as a public airing of dirty laundry, by calling out the deleterious impact these assertions have on targeted people, Unrig the Game provides a courageous interrogation of organizational implosions. It also provides a direct pathway out of destructive behavior, showcasing the experiences of several women of color who, like Daniel, have had their authority challenged and character derided.

Unrig the Game is a celebration of collaboration over competition and a wise analysis of the ways personal and political power, mental illness, and “cancel culture” intersect. This makes the book essential reading for everyone who works for, or with, feminist, queer, antiracist, and pro-democracy organizations.

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel. Random House, March 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 Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, is a long essay, more of a meditation on the serviceberry than an argument. Honestly, though, it is not even about the serviceberry, as she uses that as a means to talk about, as her subtitle puts it, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. However, her book is about much more than that, as she spends a substantial amount of time talking about gift economies and what that would look like in the twenty-first century world.

Kimmerer looks around the world as it currently is and finds a number of those types of gift economies already in existence. For example, in one section of the book, she uses quick examples of people taking somebody out to dinner or passing a stroller on to somebody else who needs it or another person who makes too much lasagna and shares it with a neighbor. In fact, Kimmerer often gets her serviceberries from a neighbor who grows and sells them, as that neighbor allows people to come and pick them for free.

She also uses larger examples, such as libraries and public roads or Scandinavian countries with a much higher tax base, but a much higher happiness index score, as well. Kimmerer pulls from her Indigenous roots and examines how various tribes have dealt with land management, including agreements to share lands between nations, recognizing that all benefit from the resources, so all should help care for them.

In a time where polarization seems not only to be the norm, but also to be widening in the United States (and a number of other countries around the world), a problem only reinforced by the widening wealth gap, Kimmerer reminds readers that there are other ways to be in the world. Not only that, she reminds us that those ways already exist, if only we take the time to notice them.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Scribner, November 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Carver’s debut collection of poems, draws heavily from his life growing up gay in rural Kentucky, as well as his years as a high school teacher (where he had great success, leading to his being named Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2022). Not surprisingly, then, part of this collection focuses on the struggles he faced, especially within the education system as somebody who was openly gay in a red state.

However, Carver also talks about the love he received from his parents and others in his community, especially some of his teachers, ultimately leading to his relationship with and marriage to Josh, his current husband. In “Someday Child,” for example, when he was younger, he and his father were watching an episode of Jerry Springer, an episode that focused on a gay son coming out to an unaccepting father. His father comments, “You know, if I ever had a kid who felt comfortable telling me something like that, I hope they’d / know that it would be okay with me.” Carver’s not yet comfortable making that confession to his father, so he replies, “Well if you ever have a kid like that, I hope they do.”

This collection, though, is as much about class as it is about sexuality, as Carver also faced rejection because of where he came from. In “Hard to Take Seriously,” Carver tells of travelling to a state competition in speech and debate where he believes he performs amazingly. One judge, however, only provides the comment, “Hard to take seriously with your accent.”

Thus, Carver ends up struggling to find a place to fit in the world. Within the red state, people condemn his sexuality. In the wider world, they judge his socioeconomic status and cultural background.

However, in the final poem, “The Truth Will Stand When the World’s on Fire,” Carver shows how he has reconciled who he is with where he’s from and who he loves, largely based on the acceptance of those closest to him. It is a poem that draws from apocalyptic imagery, much like the book of Revelation; the revelation that he is true to himself and to all that has made him who he is, a reconciliation of both worlds.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, June 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories from Two Lines Press book cover image

Two Line Press’ Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories brings together five previously untranslated peers of Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe in an exceptionally curated anthology of short fiction. While never explicitly stated, these are horror stories. Although their focus is never similar, enough themes and ideas are shared across all stories that it is hard to decide whether these are five isolated stories or equal parts of a homogenous universe.

Four of the five authors are women, the other queer, and gendered institutions form the bedrock through which strangeness grows. In one story, a wife’s simple hopes of going to the opera are complicated by her husband’s dimensions (he can fit in the box of a large sake bottle) and her mother-in-law’s connection to an ancient dwarf tribe. Elsewhere, a woman is so terrified by her husband’s annual departures that she obsessively buys new locks and mutilates herself — “radical cosmetic treatment” — in a way in which she hopes will keep him interested when he returns.

This is an amorphous collection, in which the only certainty is chaos. Age, size, gender and sexuality are in flux, and these characters — who seem to be contorting more than acting on their will — are archetypal protagonists of weird fiction.

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories, authors: Nobuko Takagi, trans. Philip Price; Tomoko Yoshida, trans. Margaret Mitsutani; Jeffrey Angles, trans. Jeffrey Angles; Takako Takahashi, trans. Brian Bergstrom; Taeko Kono, trans. Lucy North. Two Lines Press, Center for the Art of Translation, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a writer based in Norfolk, England.

Book Review :: Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

From earliest childhood, memoirist Marty Ross-Dolen, a now-retired child psychiatrist, knew that her mother’s life had been marked by something she could only glimpse, but which manifested as a sadness and sense of loss that nothing could fix. As she came of age, she learned the reason: her mother, Patricia [called Patsy] the second of five children, had been orphaned in 1960 when she was fourteen. A plane carrying her parents – the executives at Highlights for Children Magazine – had been flying to a meeting in New York City to discuss expanded newsstand placement when a collision between their commercial jet and another plane left no survivors. This abrupt end to life as she knew it catapulted Patsy and her siblings from their midwestern home into the home of relatives in Texas. Although they were well cared for and well-treated, from that moment on, a gaping absence hovered over every aspect of Patsy’s life.

Likewise for daughter Marty, who feared upsetting her mom by asking too many questions about the people whose photos stared at her from the living room mantlepiece. Still, she wanted to know more about her maternal lineage, so she started digging. The result, Always There, Always Gone, involved fourteen years of research, including the perusal of thousands of letters – miraculously saved by family and Highlights archivists – between Ross-Dolan’s grandmother, Mary Martin Myers, and her business associates and relatives before her death at age thirty-eight.

The result is a genre-bending memoir, offering readers fragments that Ross-Dolan calls “wisps,” a blend of conventional narrative, erasure poetry, imagined conversations between her and her grandmother, and family photographs. Moving, if somewhat enigmatic, the memoir is an emotionally rich interrogation of the legacy of grief on people who are both directly and indirectly impacted by tragedy. A wise and thoughtful addition to our understanding of the long-term effects of trauma and its transmission from parent to child.

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen. She Writes Press, May 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 :: Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Danusha Laméris displays her skill for sensual poetics in this latest collection, Blade by Blade from Copper Canyon Press. The book’s naturalist bent is apparent from poem titles like “Okra,” “Praying Mantis,” and “Let Rain Be Rain.” It’s in thoughts of this natural world that the poet has taken refuge from the grief of losing both a brother and a son. As the speaker of “Slither” says, Laméris wants to “go back into the green, green world” of her youth, when she was “small as the curve / of a spoon,” and she invites readers along with her to “start over / leaf by leaf, blade by beckoning blade.”

Laméris may miss this world, but she has no illusions about its sometimes brutal nature. As the speaker of “The Cows of Love Creek” proclaims, alluding to the circle of life, “We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.” There’s bittersweet longing in many of these poems, with the natural world linked with the emotional through techniques like the double entendre in the poem, “(R)egret,” which begins simply with, “I see the word egret, but read, instead, / regret.”

While Laméris delivers a fine collection of poems with long, lush lines, there’s a distracting tendency to stray into cliche, seen even in poem titles like, “They Say the Heart Wants.” Though not every poem hit its mark for me, the poet’s skillful lines employing deft alliteration and assonance make the collection a pleasant read overall. Readers looking for an accessible, but meaningful poetry will enjoy this.

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris. Copper Canyon Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online literary magazine dedicated to poetry chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published by The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, On the Seawall, and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: Joyride by Ellen Meister

JoyRide by Ellen Meister book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

Joyride by Ellen Meister invites readers to travel along as Joybird Martin embarks on her dream of becoming a life coach — from the driver’s seat of her humble blue Honda Accord. Despite a challenging upbringing and an array of insecurities, Joybird is a determined optimist, seeing the glass always brimming: “It’s a choice. I make that decision every day.”

There were times I wanted to reach into the story and shake that young woman by the shoulders for putting the needs of others ahead of her own and for some questionable choices, particularly regarding her love life. I was that invested. Also, I was occasionally annoyed at her brittle, sarcastic father. There’s some mystery around why the father’s career is in desperate straits, although I can surely guess.

Meister is skilled in advancing plot and developing characters through dialogue. With unexpected challenges or new clients, Joybird needed only a few centering breaths to find her way to empathy. Navigating plenty of intergenerational, romantic, and New York City caste conflict, Joybird journeys towards a future as bright “as the sun rising resplendently over a seedy New York City impound lot.” A fun read about the power of attitude and choices.

Joyride by Ellen Meister. Montlake, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle Prize winner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Book Review :: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is set in ancient Greece, fifth-century Syracuse, to be exact. The Syracusans have recently defeated the Athenians in battle, a surprise to both sides, and they are keeping their prisoners of war in a quarry until they die. Lampo and Gelon are unemployed Syracusan potters, so they use their free time to visit the quarry to see which, if any, Athenians know any of Euripides’ plays, given Gelon’s love of theatre. That interest ultimately leads to their putting on a production of both Medea and The Trojan Women in one afternoon.

Lampo and Gelon, as well as the narrator, don’t sound like they live in ancient Greece, though; they sound like they live in twenty-first Ireland, more or less. Lennon, though, doesn’t play that approach for laughs. He simply uses contemporary language and voice to delve into the life of Lampo — the center of attention — as he tries to understand who he is. Gelon is the one who loves theatre and comes up with the idea to visit the Athenians, while Lampo simply goes along with his friend. Along the way, though, he has to make choices that will define the rest of his life.

It would be easy to say that this novel is about the power of art — Gelon at one point says, “It’s poetry we’re doing. It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.” — but the novel is about more than that, as any good art is. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and hatred and love and mistakes. In other words, it’s about humanity, whether in ancient Greece or contemporary Ireland. The struggles and successes are the same, no matter the time or place.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Henry Holt and Company, March 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Though Susanne Dyckman’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s collaborative poetry collection Rendered Paradise “offers no route” to the poets’ compositional method, the experience of reading the collection prompts consideration of what constitutes collaboration. True artistic collaboration occurs when the combined result exceeds the sum of its parts, creating a third entity that, to borrow phrases from the poems, “assures its own fidelity” to a “truer / form of two,” one that is “sublimely unemphatic.” The emphasis and spirit of Rendered Paradise is on “Voices conjoined” in an “intimacy” of seeing.

Rendered Paradise “tells” the poets’ “story of looking” inspired by artists Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The collection is divided into three sections, each devoted to looking at, responding to, and highlighting the artists’ subject matter and aesthetic. Poems inspired by Vivian Maier’s artworks emphasize portrait and gesture. Those responding to Agnes Martin explore color, shape, and pattern. Poems influenced by Kiki Smith’s artworks incorporate themes of animals, reptiles, and the cosmos. The poems “model” a language of active looking regardless of the subject-artist or the poet-speaker.

Collectively, they are “Who see it all.” The poems sometimes convey the perspective of one of the poets, and at other times reflect the viewpoints of the artists. The reader is left uncertain of who “I” or “you” refers to within the poems. This “gesture beyond its own climate” suggests the poets’ intention to transcend the “dispute” over the “proximity of the pronoun.” As one poem describes, “Where / voice stops explaining patterns, it begins to have a body.”

With both collaborative method and “Identity pushed aside,” Dyckman’s and Robinson’s ekphrastic poems are “assemblage bound” and stand “for the mixing,” writing toward a “release” of pride in the seer and attachment to the seen/scene. Rendered Paradise is an exaltation of pure seeing.

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson. Apogee 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Close to Home by Michael Magee

Close to Home by Michael Magee book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sean is a young man in Belfast, Ireland, who spends most of his time drinking or doing drugs, seemingly not making any progress in life. He and one of his best friends, Ryan, live in an apartment that they’re about to be evicted from, as their landlord ran away, and it has black mold growing in it, as well. They both work as bartenders to try to make some money, but they’ve been barred from most of the places they try to go and drink due to their behavior. In fact, the novel opens with Sean about to go to court for punching somebody at a house party, causing serious harm to the young man’s face and mouth.

However, life wasn’t supposed to go this way for Sean, as he was different than his friends. He left Belfast and went to Liverpool, where he attended university and received a degree in English. He wanted to be a writer.

He has long odds to overcome, though, as his family has fallen apart. His mother left his father when Sean was young, and it’s clear that the lack of a father has wrecked Sean. He spends part of his free time looking his father online, as well as his half-sister from his father’s new marriage. Both of Sean’s brothers behave as recklessly as he does, prompting his mother to be surprised that it’s Sean who ends up going to court due to violence. They may have learned that violence from the IRA members they grew up around.

The one bit of light in Sean’s life is Mairéad, a young woman Sean grew up with. She was as violent and out of control as Sean and his friends, but she has changed her life. She spends much of the novel preparing to move to Berlin to try to break into the world of independent filmmaking. The problem is Sean makes the same mistakes again and again. Magee raises the question of how much environment shapes people and how one can love friends and family who might be preventing one from growing. There aren’t easy answers, but the reader continues to hope Sean can figure his life out.

Close to Home by Michael Magee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion

Gutter Rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

As the title gutter rainbows implies, “grit” and “glitter” coexist in Melissa Eleftherion’s third poetry collection. “Double consciousness” is also a characteristic of the poems’ speaker: “Before [she] understood the war of misogyny / [she] battled [her] own blood for understanding.” The poems also double in their artistic purpose, offering the poet “an attempt to / convene with the memory of the / interruption” while offering the reader “the story of [a girl’s] formation.”

The collection opens with Eleftherion’s portrayal of a “defiant,” self-possessed girl, navigating life between her own “kindling” and the challenging, often dangerous interactions with men. Eleftherion’s girl was “taught to hold space for the lion / sit quiet at his table” and to endure the “street mouths” as she walks “the avenue of eyeballs.” The poems highlight how these power dynamics and threats “damage” the girl’s sense of self-worth, leading to “internalized hatred” and “misogyny.”

As Eleftherion explores how the male gaze and patriarchal expectations “fracture” a girl’s life, she draws comparisons with how a geological depression interrupts a landform. Fracture variously appears in the poems as “gutter,” “gash,” “crack,” “ditch,” “pit,” “trench,” but in each case describes the shape of a landform that is lower in elevation than the surrounding area. This metaphor provides a visual and visceral vocabulary for experiences of trauma and the challenges faced by girls “fighting to be seen beneath” “a line of semen.”

Dear Sister Reader, “her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect.” Along with Eleftherion, we “hover as transformation / in the interstices / warrior, queen.”

So too, the transformation of trauma into poetry. Melissa Eleftherion’s gutter rainbows constructs a “lyric from the detritus.” While the poems explore themes of faults and fractures, they simultaneously reach “up up,” embodying true feminist resilience.

gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion. Querencia 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, might lead readers to think that he is the center of the book, especially with a focus on the various ways he feels pulled in two different directions. That latter part is true, but the true center of the book is Ba Má, his parents. He describes how they fled from North to South Vietnam, then to the United States. While Nguyen was alive during that time, he was too young to have many memories. He also talks about how hard his parents worked owning and running a grocery store, helping to provide for him and his brother.

However, Nguyen also talks about how he began to pull away from his parents, while also celebrating them in this book. Like many refugees and immigrants who come to America (or, as Nguyen describes it, AMERICATM), he loses much of his language and culture, partly because he wants to be more American, but partly because the culture that surrounds him shapes him differently than it does his parents, who spend much of their time at work.

That culture leads to a serious fracture in how Nguyen sees himself and the world, especially the various portrayals of Vietnam in the culture of his childhood. He talks about watching movies, such as Apocalypse Now and Rambo II: First Blood, seeing actors from other Asian countries play Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. However, he also digs deeper into the idea of colonizer and colonized, showing that people from North Vietnam, like his parents, took land from the Montagnards, an Indigenous group in the Central Highlands of the country.

One question he continually returns to is what has made him (and other refugees) who he is: is that because he is a refugee and Vietnamese or because of his family and his personal traumas. His book explores both of those poles without trying to reconcile them, as if there is any way they could be reconciled.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press, October 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s latest work, Behind You is the Sea, is a series of interlocking stories that follow several Palestinian American families through their lives in Baltimore. While they all know each other well, their relationships both between families and within families are often strained, sometimes due to differences in class, but often because of a moral judgment one makes against another.

For example, the opening story centers on Reema Baladi, a young woman pregnant with her first child. She’s been seeing Torrey, but now that she’s pregnant, he is less interested in her. She compares herself to Amal, who is also pregnant, but who is planning to have an abortion, a decision that has made her an outcast in the community, including her family, as her parents have kicked her out of the house.

The collection ends with a story focused on Marcus Salameh, Amal’s brother. Their father has died, and Marcus has to take the body back to Palestine to bury him there. He discovers that their father had been supporting a woman named Rita, whom the Israelis had imprisoned and raped, leading to the community’s subtly ostracizing her—she’s invited to funerals, but not to weddings, for example. Marcus is confused as to how his father could reconcile supporting Rita, while banishing Amal, his own daughter.

The stories in between explore other relationships that are severed or strained, but also those that reconnect and grow. While some families break apart, other relationships develop and strengthen. There are stories that deal with domestic violence and eating disorders, but also those that reveal characters who discover the ability to love and forgive. As Marcus reflects in the final story, “The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.” Through all of their suffering, these are characters who cherish life, even when, like all of us, they do so inconsistently and imperfectly.

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj. HarperVia, January 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

Book Review :: Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Through the poems in their debut chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, Koss “face[s] the world so raw and open,” endeavoring to address a traumatic past and to make “some beautiful things.” Accomplishing this entails “filling in the blanks” between the “sticky” memories of childhood “horror and experience” and taking “the liberties one / can take when” “art is conceived.”

The poet, “dancing [their] pen between” the verse line and the prose sentence, offers poems from the perspective of adulthood, looking “backwards” at the flawed adults who abused and abandoned them. Because the poems move between past and present selves, the writing is “in flux between connections and short circuits.” And, at turns, a “Cry or curse” infused with purpose: To name the “opt-out mother” and a father who “left when [they] were six”; To admit being “a victim more than once”; To grieve the death of a lover by suicide; To face the delusions of friendship and therapy. The writing also contains a “picture [of] tomorrow” in which coming to terms performs the magical act of making the trauma “go away.”

Unfortunately, it does not work that way. “There is no winning.” But trying to “be honest now” “ease[s] the pretending” and enables the poet/person to “become who they are.” Whether identifying as “craggy boxing bitch,” lesbian, “one-speed train,” or “withdrawn and frequently tired,” the poet is “a bit at odds with” self but is determined to “just feel what [they] feel.” To a survivor of abuse and oppression, the felt expression is the ultimate liberty and triumph.

These poems are “proof of… dysfunction,” but they also prove the function of art as a “salve” for what we “see / and don’t.” Whether engaging with self through trauma, queerness, psychology, or art, Koss approaches the page “with an open sense of wonder.”

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-activist Viet Thanh Nguyen was asked to deliver Harvard’s annual Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 2023, he admits that he was intimidated. After all, a string of luminaries had preceded him – Leonard Bernstein, Nadine Gordimer, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Igor Stavinsky, and Wim Wenders, among them – but in accepting the honor, he agreed to probe what it means to write as an “other.”

To begin, he had to face his otherness as an amalgam: On one hand, he’s an outsider because of his race (Vietnamese) and working-class, refugee background. But he’s also an insider because of his occupation (English professor at USC) and current social standing (MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowship recipient).

Furthermore, Nguyen understands that his privilege is not representative of other “others.” Nonetheless, he defines otherness as encompassing all who are “out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves.” This, he writes, includes “the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed.”

That is, pretty much everyone aside from white, ruling-class males.

The essays in To Save and To Destroy move seamlessly between the personal and the political, and while Nguyen presents a plethora of sometimes-obtuse literary references, he expresses heartfelt solidarity with refugees and those in exile. While he contests their categorization as voiceless – he believes everyone has a voice, even if it’s ignored – he is unfailingly sympathetic to individual struggles. Particularly moving is his account of displacement’s impact on mental health. In fact, by zeroing in on his mother’s psychiatric hospitalizations, the book provides a deeply-felt account of exile’s toll. It’s beautifully wrought.

Nguyen’s deepest wish is for humanity to move into “expansive political solidarity” for collective liberation. It’s an inspiring, if aspirational, vision.

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Belknap Press, April 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 :: Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The poems of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another form a “chromosomal / bridge of inheritance, progenitors resurrected.” Informed by his family’s lore, Lavender recounts the “crackling murmur” between generations while dispensing with categorical divisions between genre (poetry and memoir) and persona (poet and narrator).

Come One Thing Another is a collection of memoiristic poetry. Cory Lavender is the person recording the lives of his “Milk Father,” an uncle accidentally shot over the “fate of [his] heifer,” an aunt who survived the Depression, and a great grandmother with a bad temper, among others on his mother’s and father’s sides of the family.

The Roy and Lavender families are chock full of rebellious, tell-it-like-it-is characters with ties to Africa, Jamaica, Germany, and Nova Scotia. Lavender, the poet among them, writes idiomatically and colloquially, giving voice to and “capturing” his relatives’ “likenesses” in rangy poems that offer opinions on deer hunting, plastics pollution, lobster prices, and “Hard Times” that affect the way of life of his family, who farm and hunt the land in a “guns and grub” relationship that makes them intimately aware of change. “Nothing like it used to be.”

To “extend remembrance” is at the heart of what motivates Lavender to write his family story. The poet is also writing to address the “shadows” and “tangle” regarding his place in his family tree.

Necessarily, a few poems address the fact that he, like his father, “grew up unaware he’s mixed,” “half-ashamed of [his] signature curls.” In the poem “Fort Cory,” the most self-telling poem within the collection, the poet confesses feeling “embarrassed writing this.” Such are the personal and artistic pressures to measure up to the “hallowed coordinates” of the people he loves.

Despite being “Besieged by insecurities,” Cory Lavender walks his own “stretch of shore” in his “cobbled ode” and heartfelt memorial.

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender. Gaspereau 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.