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Shocking, Elegiac, Revelatory

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed JonesGuest Post by Evan White

I’ve been reading the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. What I like about the book is this: the story of a young, gay black man growing up in the south could go any number of expectedly tragic ways. And in the hands of a lesser writer, a story like Jones’s might have fallen prey to the unrelenting misery that is so often a substitute for poignancy. As it stands, however, How We Fight for Our Lives clips along without stopping to cry, and it’s this clear-eyed observation—this cataloguing of experience, and, by implication, the self—that makes Jones’s story by turns shocking, elegiac, and revelatory. Plus, he’s funny.

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Simon & Schuster, October 2019.

Reviewer bio: Evan White is a graduate of the University of California, Davis. White co-founded Absurd Publications and published the anthology, All the Vegetarians in Texas Have Been Shot, in addition to the creative journal The Oddity.

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Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von EckartshausenGuest Post by Katie Anderson

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary is a beautifully written series of letters about the evolution of humankind published in 1793. Karl von Eckartshausen describes the “mystery of the New Man” as the synthesis of an alchemical union between man and spirit, or man and God. This transformative art he explains must occur as the mystery teachings from ancient Greece, through a series of stages. This formula espouses an evolution of knowing thyself outwardly, then inwardly.

Eckartshausen illustrates the formula for the transformative art as one that confers wisdom at successive levels, but not as an undertaking belonging to an elite group. He had envisioned it as a spiritual pursuit that the whole of humankind would enter, not a secret practice known only to men in the lodges and salons of the eighteenth century. Eckartshausen uses biblical symbolism and allegory to express the philosophy of an esoteric spiritual counsel 55 years before the advent of Spiritualism and 102 years before Theosophy. This “interior community of light” in union with humankind, produces the illuminated community. Two archetypes embody the exoteric and the esoteric, the Priest and the Prophet, whose union produces the archetype of the illuminated man.

People are looking towards traditional and alternative forms of spirituality to find inner peace of mind. This is in response to the constraints of shelter orders and social distancing measures in place to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. Quarantine has stripped away human social interaction, but it also has dissolved our illusions. We’re no longer comfortably numb. When there isn’t anyone to talk to, we listen to the silence and talk to ourselves. What might we learn in the interim?

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen, edited by Isabel de Steiger. William Rider & Son, Ltd, 1909.

Reviewer bio: Katie Anderson is a historian and writer living in Troy, Missouri.  Her work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer and The Far Shining One.

Soothing & Stinging – Poetry of Christina Fulton

Guest Post by Preston L. Allen

The poems in Christina Fulton’s exquisite debut collection, To the Man in the Red Suit, are ruminations on a life of the ironic, the beautiful, the poignant, and the bitter-sweet.  Prominent among the memories that are fuel for the fire of these poems are the poet’s childhood in New Jersey and the suicide of her workaholic father.  My favorite poem, an ode called “To My Father’s Confused and Empty Desk,” ends with the perfectly adroit enjambment of lines:

He only came back
to count your rings,

and kiss the scissors

good night.

Sometimes these pretty poems soothe, sometimes they sting, sometimes they fill your mouth with precious stones that you cannot chew but break your teeth on trying.  The poet uses no clichés but masterfully creates them: ‘I saw your lies bend’; ‘That imperfect field / where Jesus / taught the lilies to blush’; ‘You can jiggle / but can you bend?’  Long after you read this book, you will be quoting from it.

To the Man in the Red Suit by Christina Fulton. Rootstock Publishing, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Preston L. Allen is a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and author of the novels Jesus Boy, All or Nothing, and Every Boy Should Have a Man. He lives in South Florida.

Looking Within Through Poetry

Them Last Visit by Chad AbushanabGuest Post by José Jiménez Vivaldi

Abuse, suicide, abandonment, and enough alcoholism to mimic a Bukowski novel, Chad Abushanab’s The Last Visit narrates his troubled past in a series of seemingly chronological scenes, each depicting the aforementioned themes. With the collection standing as an exploration into the depths of human pain, Abushanab leads the expedition with such introspection that it sets an example of bravery for its readers.

Though a poetry collection, The Last Visit reads like a novel. The pieces are narrative and contain lots of concrete detail. Most of them could stand alone and give the reader an understanding of Abushanab’s story, but to read only one poem is like viewing a complex image from just one angle. The poems tell different stories, and take different forms as Abushanab experiments with a variety of poetic vehicles, such as the ode, the ballad, the ghazal, and the elegy. However, they’re all are connected by their themes, which directly relate to his upbringing, as well as his struggles to cope with the scars of his past as an adult. Therefore, upon reading the collection in a linear manner, the reader develops a three-dimensional perspective of his story and family.

If there’s one message The Last Visit sends to its readers, it’s that the answers to the present can be found in the past, but the future is yours to define. Chad Abushanab did a wonderful job creating such an insightful piece of literature. Not only should writers aspire to shine a light at the darkness within themselves to create material the way he does, but readers should adopt similar methods of self-reflection to aid their personal growth.

The Last Visit by Chad Abushanab. Autumn House Press, March 2019.

Review bio: José Jiménez Vivaldi is part of this year’s graduating class at Loyola University Maryland.

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We Still Have Books – Christopher Chambers Reads Eduardo Halfon

Monastery by Eduardo HalfonGuest Post by Christopher Chambers

I discovered Eduardo Halfon in a used bookstore, not so long ago but long enough ago that used bookstores were open and one was able yet to indulge in the decadent past-time of browsing. Halfon’s novel The Polish Boxer caught my eye. I bought it and read it, and then purchased the other two books of his that have been translated into English (all handsomely published by Bellevue Literary Press).

I began Monastery in solitude amid the pandemic. Upon completing it, I experienced the uncanny feeling of when the lights come up after the end of good film and you walk out of the theater into the world, now dark, perhaps raining, and it seems like a strange and different world as you emerge from the world of the film (another of those experiences no longer available to us). We still have books though, and reading as a strategy for survival. I’m slowly emerging from the world of Monastery and I’m in no particular hurry to leave it behind. I’m resisting for the moment reaching for Mourning, the next of his books which awaits on the shelf alongside a selection from the lovely NYRB reprint series, some of which also await reading, some re-reading.

Halfon has said that he’s only writing one book, and everything he publishes is just part of it, as if each book he writes is another chapter. Mourning awaits me, the next chapter of this ongoing book. And I await Mourning, which I suspect will become necessary in the coming weeks and months as we proceed further into this century and all it has in store. Robert Bolaño once said: “The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to (Andrés) Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.” Eduardo Halfon is among that number.

Monastery by Eduardo Halfon. Bellevue Literary Press, February 2014.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Chambers is editor of Midwest Review, and author of Delta 88, a small book of very short fiction. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Books from the Past Warning Us of the Present

Hot Zone by Preston & Blood Work by TuckerGuest Post by Leland Davidson

As COVID-19 has ravaged this world effecting many emotionally and physically, the emotions of how governments are handling are telling as well. Two books show a serendipitous attitude we are dealing with today as a society, while also showing history repeating itself.

One of these is The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which gives a in depth story and research on Ebola. The book is based around different stories detailing where it came from, how it spread, and close call to a pandemic that almost ravaged the United States. What makes this book so chilling are the stories that took place in the 1980s and 90s in the continent of Africa and United States, but are detailed examples of what we are seeing today. These stories range from the beginning of the disease’s origins showing how messing with nature can cause a pandemic, or how nonuse of safety measures will help spread the disease. This book is a chilling narrative of how history, disease, and panic is not new, which should be a lesson for all.

Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker details the history of blood transfusion in England and France in the 1600s, going into detail of its history and the people involved in its transformation. Showing medical science experiments of the time may seem crazy today, but it is still relevant in modern thinking. With current news stories of people selling snake oils or ways to cure COVID-19, we see similarities in the core belief of the time that blood from a cow transfused with a sheep will make a monster. The book shows how scientific, political, and religious clashes of the 1600s mimic today’s clashes. Tucker details the narrative that stopping science and medical experiments will not only stop breakthroughs but keep humans in the dark instead of forward thinking to a better life.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Penguin Random House, June 1999.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company, May 2012.

Reviewer bio: Leland Davidson, a native of East Tennessee, holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Heller School at Brandeis University, 2020.

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Lovely Use of Language

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin BarryGuest Post by Doug Mathewson

I am a confirmed fan of Kevin Barry I enjoy his telling of a tale, his settings and plots, but it is his lovely and amazing use of language that wins me over. He is not for every reader, I’ll grant you that, but for those of us who enjoy the journey as much or more than the destination he is a delight.

The story of Night Boat to Tangier has our boys, two aging Irish gents Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne, in the old Spanish port of Algeciras. They are haunting the boat reception terminal in hopes of intersecting a specific passenger. She is Dilly Hearne, and intricately related to them both.

Through Maurice and Charlie’s charming recollections and reminiscences we learn of their shared history of violence, drug smuggling, betrayal, addiction, and madness. But here we are, on the other side of all that, as they wait for 23-year-old Dilly who they both truly love, and who may have done them wrong.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Penguin Random House, September 2019.

Reviewer bio: Doug Mathewson regards himself as quite grand but actually is a most modest fellow who spends his days writing short fiction and working as Senior Editor for Blink-Ink which publishes the finest in contemporary 50-word fiction. More of his work can be found at www.little2say.org

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Valuable Tool for Activists

Wading Right In by Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. AshworthGuest Post by Richie Swanson

Ever dreamt of saving turtles squashed on highways? Of creating clean water and carbon sequestration? Of undoing the havoc humanity has wrought upon nature? Then read Wading Right In. It interprets crucial science for the layman and sometimes reads like a novel, depicting wetland-loving characters irrepressibly driven to protect nature. Some wetland lovers save and incubate eggs from road-killed diamondback turtles and release hatchlings into the wild. Another knocks on doors with a rare spadefoot toad in hand and convinces a landowner to conserve its habitat. Another invents tidal gates made of olive barrels to restore a city’s impounded (and dying) saltmarshes. Others restore an eroding island, unloading 500 barges of sand and gravel by hand, growing their own native vegetation and enlisting 350 ninth graders to help plant a shoreline.

The wetland-loving scientists present themselves with humor. One describes sinking into freezing mud in the dark until a professor pulls her out. The book reveals nature’s genius: a fishing spider the size of a human hand has a waxy coating and hairs on legs that allows it to zoom through water as it turns prey five times its weight into “a sushi smoothie.” Wetland plants create their own air pipes and oxygen pumps, and beavers build mud piles and secrete scents that enable other beavers to know their nutritional health and kinship connections.

Authors Ashworth and Koning discuss the science of ecosystem services to assess mitigation, the legal process of compensating wetlands loss in one place by creating wetlands in another. The assessment involves water filtration, flood control, carbon storage, shoreline protection and species diversity—not dry details but valuable tools for activists. This book inspired me as much as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson.

Wading Right In: Discovering the Nature of Wetlands by Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth. The University of Chicago Press, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Richie Swanson’s novel First Territory depicts the Yakama War 1855-56. His short stories about Indian-white relations and bird-related nonfiction are republished from journals at richieswanson.com.

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White Oleander: Like a Favorite Album on Repeat

White Oleander by Janet FitchGuest Post by Ashanté J. Ford

The rawness and compassion of “White Oleander” by Janet Fitch had me turning pages so fast that I was surprised when it was finished. This book read like a favorite album that I can’t stop listening to on repeat. It carried me into the deep despair and depression that comes with being an orphan child, and raised me like I was its own. White Oleander is a book I will never forget.

Fitch captures the bond of a mother and daughter like a photograph, while simultaneously weaving the implications of imperfection into their relationship. This renowned fictional story follows a young girl by the name of Astrid Magnussen into adulthood while she navigates how to grow up and deems her religion as “survival.” This novel captivated me in the same way poetry does. I wanted to listen to the brute advice Astrid’s mother gave and I wanted to fall into lust with every person that gave Astrid hope. Hope was a loose character in this book. It left as soon as it was near and pulled away every single time.

This novel has gained praise from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, and was even adapted into a film after it became a national bestseller in the early 2000s. I applaud this book for its versatility and creativeness. The themes of motherhood were depicted in such a poignant manner—they made me grovel and thank God for the woman that birthed me.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Hachette, September 2006.

Reviewer bio: Ashanté J. Ford is 21 years old. She is in college pursuing her bachelor’s degree in International Relations.

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Traveling the World While at Home

Guest Post by June Calender

While “sheltering in place,” I’m taking a serious look at the natural world through what I’m reading.

I began with Robert Macfarlane’s nonfiction Underland which explores the world of fungi and root systems under forests then goes much, much deeper in caves all over the world. I am a claustrophobic and had many breathless moments but survived with a sense of awe.

That was followed by Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory, which is about old growth forests and people trying to save them.

Trapped in my apartment, I have still been able to see many parts of the world in depth.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. W. W. Norton & Company, June 2019.
The Overstory by Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Company, April 2019.

Reviewer bio: June Calender retired to Cape Cod after 20+ years as an off-off-Broadway playwright in NYC. She now teaches writing skills at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Cape Cod Community College. Her work has been published in various small journals.

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A “Love Letter” to Writing on Plague

The Decameron - Giovanni BoccaccioGuest Post by Bill Cushing

Where have you been all my life, Giovanni?

You’d think that, studying lit, I’d have read Boccaccio’s Decameron during my studies, but somehow, that was not the case. Feeling guilty about that, I bought a copy last year, and the timing couldn’t have been better than the present to actually read it.

Full disclosure: mine isn’t the complete text but 25 stories chosen for this edition, but I’m still glad to have gotten around to it at some point in my lifetime because—even with what appears to be a somewhat “clunky” translation—I regret the years of never having visited this work. I’ve long known how Boccaccio inspired Chaucer, after translating it into English, to write The Canterbury Tales, but readers can also see the influence that this has had on many future writers.

In the first story of day one, Boccaccio recounts tale of a conman wrangling near-sainthood from the Church, a character reminding me of Moliere’s Tartuffe with a trace of Nikolai Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls.

And so it goes.

By the way, that plagiarism of Vonnegut is not accidental since his view of human behavior and character are here as well. One even sees traces of Shakespeare in these ribald, often downright dirty tales that are occasionally a dark but always fascinating peek into the human condition—something that hasn’t changed much despite all our other advances. Written in a style very much in the oral tradition of storytelling, Boccaccio’s narrators regale each other during a time of plague, proving how important “stories” are to our spiritual, cultural, moral as well as mental health.

Anyone willing to take a deep dive about 700 years back will find a worthwhile literary journey in these pages. Plus it’s easily found it online!

The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

Our Haunted Past: On Molly McCully Brown’s Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown. Guest Post by Kelly Williamson

In her remarkable debut, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Molly McCully Brown revisits the history of a state-run institution that sterilized patients without their consent, offering readers the opportunity to confront the dark realities of the eugenics movement. With a documentary approach, Brown bases the poems on the historical evidence she gleans from archival research. Exploring the perspectives of the colony’s caretakers, and patients, Brown pays tribute to an unacknowledged chapter from our nation’s dark history.

This collection serves as evidence of Brown’s curiosity and bravery in facing what she considered unknown and scary. Similarly, it can be an act of discovery for the reader as well. Readers might be alarmed to come across such wreckage that they once failed to notice. However, Brown invites readers to understand, rather than rebuking them for not knowing. Brown’s collection reminds us that poetry builds empathy that can raise the awareness needed to foster change.

Readers may have never heard of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, a blind room, or known of the sterilizations posed as appendectomies in the state-run institution located in Virginia. Brown’s book allows readers to recognize that this lack of knowledge is a privilege, for the painful history that took life away from innocent girls is a history that must be known. Although much has changed, these poems can encourage us to understand ways in which our current society can do better. While it’s easy for readers to see the title and feel far removed from history, this collection of poems works to close that gap of separation, to use these imagined patients as windows into a haunting past.

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown. Persea Books, 2017.

Reviewer bio: Kelly Williamson is a senior at Loyola University Maryland minoring in writing. She has published poems in her school’s literary magazine, Corridors.

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Relevant Reading for Everyone

Penguin Book of Migration Literature - Dohra AhmadGuest Post by Serenity Schoonover

As 68.5 million people currently live as displaced persons on the planet, a short, potent anthology on immigration, emigration, and asylum-seeking is relevant reading for everyone. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns showcases thirty writers’ artful examinations of striking out to start over, staying put despite instability, and even circling back to a country that disowned you.

Among established writers, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “The Bridge of the Golden Horn,” notes the wry negotiations of Turkish factory women in Germany: “the man made meatballs out of horses- we didn’t know that, because we couldn’t speak German. Meatballs were our mother’s favorite food.” Another, from Mehdi Charef’s “Tea in the Harem,” examines the volatile relationship between an Algerian mother and her son in France, both caught in the cross-hairs of identity crisis, “between two cultures, two languages, and two colors of skin.”

Emerging writer Djamila Ibrahim’s story, “Heading Somewhere,” laments an Ethiopian man’s marriage of convenience, a relationship based on leverage rather than love: “he resented Marianne her power. Divorce meant the loss of his permanent resident card, maybe even deportation.” Most unforgettable in the collection is Warsan Shire’s prose poem, “Conversations about Home (From the Deportation Center),” which begs the question: “Do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair?”

The power of this anthology, edited by Dohra Ahmad with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat, is its potential to be the first in a line of future works, literature that is willing to discuss, rather than dismiss or demonize, “people with deep histories-individuals as well as collective- that predate the migration, rather than newly created humans whose lives begin in a boat, plane or desert crossing.”

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad. Penguin Random House, September 2019.

Reviewer bio: Essays by Serenity Schoonover have aired on NPR, with book reviews appearing in Split Rock Review, Women’s Independent Press, CALYX, The Bookends Review, among others.

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Ijeoma Oluo’s Call to Action

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma OluoGuest Post by C.L. Butler

Have you ever read a book and felt that it was actually a call to action? I have been fortunate enough to be able to take refuge in art while social distancing. I’ve read a variety of different books written by authors ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Bram Stoker. One book that stood out to me was Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. Oluo tells of her personal experiences as not only a Black woman, but also a queer woman, single mother, middle class, biracial feminist. I found this intersectional approach to be a metaphoric glass of ionized water. It’s the refreshing kick in the ass that society needs in order to come to terms with progress.

By adopting a multilayered intersectional lens, Oluo allows the reader to fully explore numerous alternate perspectives beyond their own. Oluo asserts that societal norms and social constructs including, but not limited to, patriarchy, misogyny, and heteronormativity dictate the world around us. In reading the book, I felt that the author had a true understanding that these topics are uncomfortable which provides an authentic vulnerability rather than a purely academic narrative.

Oluo provides a conversational manual for all backgrounds. She also owns her personal privileges throughout the book. Her work challenges skeptics to not only hear, but also feel her point of view. After reading So You Want to Talk About Race my eyes were opened even wider. We all need the dosage of reality that Oluo offers being a queer female of color.

So You Want to Talk About Race is the perfect read and cultural model for a 21st century audience. This book illuminates the aspects of patriarchy running rampant throughout various institutions. I highly recommend to it anyone looking to do more for inclusion.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Seal Press, January 2018.

Reviewer bio: C.L. Butler is an African American poet, historian, and entrepreneur from Philadelphia based in Houston, TX. In 2017 his poem ‘Laissez Faire’ was published by the University of Houston-Downtown Bayou Review. In 2019 he published academic research with the Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy.

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Wade in the Poems of Maggie Paul

Scrimshaw by Maggie PaulGuest Post by Lynn Levin

Maggie Paul’s Scrimshaw gifts us with superbly crafted poems of graceful statement and gentle wisdom. I sense here a soul making peace with the near past and distant past as the speaker recollects mother, father, children, a lover, and others. Paul writes in “Linguistics,” a poem about some unspecified but insurmountable conflict between lovers: “So much goes on beneath / the surface that the tide never washes up.” Conflicts here are discreetly remembered and slantly alluded to. This is an approach I particularly admire as it counters much of the graphic rhetoric of pain we see in poems today.

A water motif runs through many of the poems, referencing ponds, streams, and the sea. There is both delight and melancholy in these poems, and the melancholy glows as burnished gold. Take for example the opening lyric “Trochilidae.” The poem compares a diminished girl to a tiny fragile bird who comes to “bring fire to the world.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Watershed,” a metaphysical poem about the flow of life and time. This prose poem tumbles forth in a rush of figurative language describing the flow of water, which is “fragrant as a season, forthright as a calendar.” Paul has the ideal sense of an ending, landing her poems neither too definitively, nor too ambiguously. In “Looking Back,” a poem about doubt and written in a series of couplets that capture paradoxes and contradictions, she writes, “We thought we came for one thing / but really came for another.” The lyric ends, “And that thing we would have died for? / We’ll not die for it again.” These are poems of wise beauty. Wade in them.

Scrimshaw by Maggie Paul. Hummingbird Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).

Stephen King’s Novel of Hope and Resilience

The Stand by Stephen KingGuest Post by David Armand

My kids’ last day of school was on Friday, March 13, four weeks ago today. They left class that afternoon not knowing that they wouldn’t be seeing their friends or teachers again for who knows how long. They seem worried sometimes, confused. So am I. But we’ve finally been able to settle into somewhat of a routine here at home: we made a vegetable garden in the backyard last week, bought some baby chickens and built a brooder for them. It gives everyone something to do.

And I like to spend the first hour or so of each morning—when it’s still dark outside and quiet—reading before everyone else wakes up. I’ve always done this, but now the act seems more meditative, more important than it ever has before.

You see, the day after the schools closed and I went to working remotely from home, I picked up Stephen King’s The Stand from my bookshelf. It’s an old copy and the dust jacket is torn off, tucked between the yellowed pages as a bookmark, but still I’ve been reading it every day since all this started.

It’s a long novel, just over eight-hundred pages, and I’ve spent this last month reading it for what is now the third time (I read the unabridged version, which is over a thousand pages long, in 1998; then I read it again about fifteen years later).

But now, on this third read, it seems more poignant than ever: not necessarily because it’s about a plague that wipes out most of the human population, but more because it’s a novel about the inherent sense of hope that people tend to have, about the faith we place in the goodness of others—even in the darkest of times. Which is something to remember now more than ever.

The Stand by Stephen King. Anchor, 1978.

Reviewer bio: David Armand’s latest novel, The Lord’s Acre, is forthcoming this fall from Texas Review Press.

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Tangible Acts of Resistance

Dictionary of the Undoing by John FreemanGuest Post by RS Deeren

John Freeman’s Dictionary of the Undoing, a collection of twenty-six alphabetical short essays, is a reclamation project, collating a “lexicon of engagement and meaning” for progressive political protest. Freeman sees language as “the one tool being vandalized before our very eyes” in the news, on social media, and in public spheres. Starting with “Agitate” and charging through words like “Citizen” and “Hope,” Freeman highlights the ways in which the meanings of single words have been split, twisted, or ignored until they are either used against us, like in the section “Police,” or until they lose much of their power, a notion present in the section “Vote.” Of particularly high import in a book filled with immediacy, are the sections on “I” and “You.”

In “I,” Freeman tackles the internet as used today: to promote and protect an image of ourselves, to ensconce the self, through algorithms and polishing of persona. The phone resembles a mirror and our capacity for seeing the world beyond the mirror, of hearing voices outside the echo chamber, has severely limited our compassion for one another. Freeman argues that this curation of the individual “I” keeps us from becoming a much more powerful “we” capable of bringing about social change. This pitting of my “I” against your “I”, keeps us fighting among ourselves and not against the powerful and wealthy who benefit from our infighting.

In “You,” the penultimate call-to-kindness, Freeman directs a challenge plainly to You, dear reader, to engage in “one act of resistance in the form of love . . . without restriction.” Freeman echoes the “I” section here, stating that to connect through kindness is a tangible act of resistance against a society that sells us an idea of the “I” who stands on their own.

Dictionary of the Undoing by John Freeman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2019.

Reviewer bio: RS Deeren received his BA from Saginaw Valley State University, his MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and is a PhD candidate at UW- Milwaukee. You can read his creative work at www.rsdeeren.com.

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Take Risks with Adam Grant

Originals by Adam GrantGuest Post by Alicia Wilcox

Adam Grant’s Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World gave me a powerful new outlook on not only my abilities, but my untapped potential. Grant explains how big thinkers are not just the ones with big ideas, but the ones that take action. Reading this has not only changed the way I think, but the way I act. This book has helped me challenge the norm and foster innovative ideas, as well as getting others to believe in those ideas too.

Surprisingly, risk taking can make your career less fragile. Grant dives into the art of taking risks and challenging the status quo, giving a conclusive guide on transparently communicating and ensuring trust from others along the way. He busts the myths that hold us back from success and goes deep into the paradox: the ones who suffer most within a system are the least likely to challenge it. You can have talent and work ethic, but you have to be original for your ideas to win. How do we create original ideas? Grant shares his secrets on how to defeat perfectionism and produce a large volume of ideas to not only be seen by others, but also utilized for the better.

Originals is a five-star read, giving readers a sturdy foundation for how to embrace change and achieve success in a multitude entirely divergent atmospheres.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. Penguin Random House, February 2017.

Reviewer bio: Alicia Wilcox’s work has most recently been published in The Health Journal, The Dewdrop Weekly and is sold in stores across Manhattan.

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Lock-Down Pleasures in Recent Reading

Ruins of Us by Keija ParssinenGuest Post by S.B. Julian

Recently I moved into a new apartment building for people age 55-plus: the generations that grew up with books, not digitalia. Their schooling emphasized reading, which means the building’s shared library is a serendipitous treasure trove.

Why is it that a book you find by chance is often more pleasurable than an equally worthy book you specially ordered? Some delightful chance findings: Continue reading “Lock-Down Pleasures in Recent Reading”

Sniffing Out the Boogeyman

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Guest Post by Lily Anna Erb

Carmen Maria Machado creates a dark, dreamlike landscape in her experimental memoir, In The Dream House. Her story of queer domestic abuse, written as a collection of short vignettes, begins as a fairy tale. There’s a monster lurking somewhere, and the desire to sniff out the boogeyman makes you forget you’re even turning pages. Machado’s addition of fairy tale citations adds a semi-lighthearted and humorous touch to an otherwise darker narrative. Machado’s fairy tale monster takes the form of the woman who lives in the “dream house.”

Machado creates a fascinating practice in self-analysis and reader involvement by using all three modes of perspective. She utilizes third person to explain an airy concept, second person to tell the lurid contents of her tale, and first person to speak directly to the reader. The most frequently utilized perspective is the second person, where Machado seems to rip her hand through the spine of the book to touch the reader. Perhaps the most nerve-wracking example of this technique is the section titled “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” where the reader is given multiple choices of action which all lead to the same abusive conclusion.

No matter how fascinating a world Machado can craft, it doesn’t save her from unnecessary pedanticism. The form of the book, utilizing “The Dream House as . . .”  before every vignette quickly loses its original charm. The book seems to drag on unnecessarily long. Once the story loses its driving force of conflict, the reader is ready for it to end. However, these small annoyances did not totally hinder my consumption of Machado’s work. In The Dream House is full of minefields that you don’t expect. By the end of the book, the reader cheers on Machado as she recovers from her time in the “dream house.”

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Graywolf Press, November 2019.

Reviewer bio: Originally from New York, Lily Anna Erb is a sophomore studying poetry at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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Bible studies, Burgess style

Moses by Anthony BurgessGuest Post by Bill Cushing

Retiring in mid-February, I foresaw a sedentary future. However, this virus has taken even that to unexpected heights. With my time in isolation (so to speak; I have a family), I’ve been able to read Moses, a fictional narrative based on the biblical figure’s life by Anthony Burgess.

While most know Burgess for Clockwork Orange, that’s hardly his best. He is the primary reason I pursued an MFA after a 15-year absence from school.

Now I recall why I love (and envy) his writing so much. Moses is a bit closer to two of his earlier works: Napoleon Symphony, where he presents his interpretation of the diminutive conqueror’s life while dividing the book into four sections attempting to replicate the pacing of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and Man of Nazareth, a look at the life of Jesus as narrated by a Greek merchant returning from business in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion.

Moses strikes out on its own in several ways, beginning with its structure. A narrative in verse. it reminds the reader of the Greek epic poems. It humanizes its characters—even Ramses. Moses himself suffers from a speech impediment. This is not unexpected for readers familiar with Burgess; most of his characters with outward defects tend to be the only complete person: recall the grotesque minister defending Alex in Clockwork Orange or the narrator’s disfigured sister in Earthly Powers.

But, like all things coming from Burgess, there are lessons to derive from this one. Issues such as free will, individual responsibility, and respect for simply stated (not grandiose and intricate) law are chief among those. This may be one of the easiest books from Burgess to read although I’d still recommend having a dictionary handy since the linguistic “tricks” found in his diction are always entertaining.

Moses: a narrative by Anthony Burgess. Dempsey & Squires, 1976.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

A Comprehensive Search for Explanations

The Catholic School by Edoardo AlbinatiGuest Post by Katy Scrogin

Sheltering in place has provided the perfect opportunity to dive into Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, a thorough exploration of the author’s coming of age in a particular Roman neighborhood in the 1970s. More than simple description or reminiscence, the book is propelled by a comprehensive search for explanations—specifically, regarding a gruesome crime committed by a few of the quarter’s well-heeled young inhabitants. The story is itself an unsparing quest to understand the conditions and sentiments and reigning assumptions that made such a thing even conceivable.

This is no straightforward mystery or crime novel, and indeed, readers not fond of philosophical or sociocultural speculation will probably not enjoy what for this reader amounts to delicious intellectual revelry. But if the lengthy and incisive discourses on bourgeois morality and hypocrisy, the nature of violence, the troubling and troubled realities of masculinity, the strange arena that is the family, or religion and politics in Italy, aren’t your bag, all is not lost! The 1200-plus-page behemoth can most certainly be incorporated into that weight-training routine you have time to take up now that we’re all stuck inside.

The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati. Macmillan, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Katy Scrogin’s most recent online work is featured at The Book Smuggler’s Den and The Bookends Review. She can also be found at katyscrogin.wordpress.com.

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Exploring Loss with Page Hill Starzinger

Vortex Street by Page Hill StarzingerGuest Post by Shin Yu Pai

In Page Hill Starzinger’s Vortex Street, the poet explores many different kinds of loss, to resist squandering what is given. In her revisions of complicated grief, she takes up the subjects of unborn children, the ending of fertility, and becoming an orphaned adult after the death of parents. The fleeting life cycle of a mayfly which only endures for 24 hours is held against the cognitive decline of an aging father. In this act of ongoing “rentrayage” or remaking, the poet turns towards locating the quiet harbor where grief can be held—through the senescent body, its memories, and the exterior dwelling places that anchor us to the past.

Vortex Street by Page Hill Starzinger. Barrow Street Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Shin Yu Pai is the author of AUX ARCS, Adamantine, Sightings, and Equivalence. In March 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey of her work across disciplines. For more info, visit www.shinyupai.com.

Rereading Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Guest Post by Eliza Mimski

When I go through troubling times, I often reread certain chapters in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s the part starting in Chapter 27 where Jane knows that she can’t morally stay at Thornfield Hall any longer and that in order to be true to herself she must leave Mr. Rochester. On her sad voyage away from him, she loses her money and is homeless and starving and yet her connection to nature and to her God is at its strongest. She carries on, not knowing that she will soon happen upon her long-lost relatives and will later reconnect with Mr. Rochester.

What Jane, or Charlotte Brontë, does for me here is to remind me that when I’m in the middle of a crisis I need to remember to connect to my spirituality in a big way, and also to remember that no matter how bad the situation seems, the future can bring change and that I won’t stay stuck forever. To place this in the present situation, it is necessary for me to remember that the suffering brought about by the pandemic will end.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. October 1847.

Reviewer bio: I live in San Francisco, California, and am doing my best, like the rest of you, to stay healthy during the pandemic. Find my website here.

C.J. Sansom’s 16th Century Reality

Tombland by CJ SansomGuest Post by M.C. LeBrun 

In C.J. Sansom’s seventh addition to the marvellous Shardlake series, we find ourselves in 1549 and once more at the whims of the Lady Elizabeth, a self-possessed and impassioned fifteen-year-old with little hint of teenage naivety. A missing woman reappears and is then savagely murdered. Her estranged husband, a distantly related Boleyn, stands accused of the crime. Matthew Shardlake is sent to Norfolk to investigate and uncovers intrigue at the highest echelons of elite society. While there, he is captured and caught up in a Kett’s Rebellion, a revolt of the peasant classes against greedy land grabs of the local gentry.

Born with a curvature of the spine and an astute and clear-sighted intellect, Matthew navigates the unsanitary conditions and unjust realities of 16th century England in the years after Henry VIII’s demise, leaving an eleven year old boy on the throne and in the midst of a lion’s den of power players. He is a man of his time but the disability which has marks him as an outsider has also engendered an empathetic awareness of the plight of others. His own critical reckoning and that of those around him, crosses the centuries, offering more relevance to modern thinking while remaining plausibly within the realms of 16th century reality and experience.

The intimacy of Matthew’s asides along with the minutiae of his daily tasks enhances the sense we are shadowing this man through each hour of his life, adding to the immersive experience of the reader into his medieval reality. And what an existence it is: political intrigue, civic unrest, religious discord, intensely unequal economic disparity, ruptured innocence, and war crimes. Add to that Matthew’s own reluctant investigations into gruesome murders, the duplicitous doings of the social elite, and the undue suffering of the poor and powerless and we have a meticulously researched novel of such scope and depth that, by god’s wounds, it is often hard to pull oneself back from it into modern life.

Tombland by C.J. Sansom. Pan MacMillan, October 2018.

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Activities and Insight from James W. Pennebaker

Secret Life of Pronouns - James PennebakerGuest Post by Colleen M. Farrelly

As a lifelong logophile, I’ve found folks who are acerbic, insipid, and (occasionally) inimitable. However, I’d never thought about the his or hers or theirs aspect of life (or the importance of these words) until reading James Pennebaker’s The Secret Life of Pronouns.

By analyzing the words that knit together what I’d assumed were the important words of a sentence, one can learn a lot about the sentence’s writer or speaker—his/her personality, truthfulness, social status, and even future behavior. Pennebaker even includes links to writing activities used to analyze traits described in the book. According to the bottle project, I’m likely to attend art shows and avoid blow-drying my hair (guilty on both counts).

With a fairly low reading level required for the activities sections and insight from disparate fields like psychology, politics, and law, this book offers something for everyone in the family. Happy reading!

The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker. Bloomsbury Press, August 2011.

Reviewer bio: Colleen M. Farrelly is a freelance writer in Palmetto Bay, FL, whose poetry has appeared in many haibun and haiku journals.

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Crowing & Hosanna-Singing with Margot Farrington

Blue Canoe of Longing - Margot FarringtonGuest Post by Robert Bensen

We can go to Margot Farrington’s The Blue Canoe of Longing (as Seamus Heaney wrote of poetry at large) “to be forwarded within ourselves,” to conceive “a new scope for our mind’s activity”—and that of the heart, as Farrington’s art draws desire out to longing, from the familiar to the exotic, lowly to lofty, in Catskill country poems and Brooklyn city poems.

The pleasure begins in effortless, exacting metaphors that create (for instance) space for the “orchestral silence” of heat lightning, the “rogue shapes” of clouds, the “buffed dominos” of Holstein cows,” the “starlight / beading like solder on a running brook.” Her imaging steadies our gaze on what we seldom glimpse of bird or bush or hill or people, for that matter.  Her heart is in the right place, which helps ours get there too.

The poems take on large ecological, cultural, personal and other issues in playing out their dramas.  Consider Robbie (“Counterweight”), a farmer pressed by his wife to kill a fox that had taken two of his Bantam roosters to feed her kits.  He should kill the fox, but the fox is old, he knows, probably on her last litter. He resolves the small war in him, coming down on the side of the angels: “Pardon was Robbie’s province. / Sharpening, silvering, the old mother would persist / as long as rough gods bid before her fade into the mists / the island made.” And he’d be rewarded with “hatchings and crowings since.”

There should be plenty of crowing and hosanna-singing over Margot Farrington’s The Blue Canoe of Longing.  Or maybe better would be paying quiet attention and being forwarded within ourselves, with new ranges for the mind’s activity.

The Blue Canoe of Longing by Margot Farrington.  Dos Madres, October 2019.

About the reviewer: Robert Bensen’s Before (2019) is his sixth book of poems. He taught at Hartwick College (1978-2017), now conducts the poetry workshop at Bright Hill Press.

Fates Intertwine in Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House

Ninth House by Leigh BardugoBook Review by Ken Brosky

Galaxy “Alex” Stern has been given a free ride to Yale, despite a shady past and nonexistent high school grades. Why? Because she can see ghosts, and one of Yale’s secret societies has use of her unique gift. If that’s not enough to get you interested, how about this: in the first 20 pages, the society Skull and Bones has already opened up a living man’s body to perform a ritual designed to pick winning stocks. That’s just a taste of the incredible creativity that awaits readers as Alex investigates the strange goings-on of the secret societies, searching for answers to a suspicious murder.

Leigh Bardugo’s writing style shifts perspective with ease, moving between two main characters whose fates are intertwined. But what sets this book apart is the incredible creativity. Each secret society in Yale practices a form of magic, with consequences that go beyond the campus. It’s difficult to come up with something new in the fantasy genre, but Bardugo’s twisted imagination succeeds so well that this book is impossible to put down.

The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. Flatiron Books, October 2019.

About the reviewer: Ken Brosky teaches English, plays guitar, and works in his woodshop when he’s not busy writing. He is short stories have been published in The Portland Review, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, among others. He’s currently represented by agent Sandra Sawicka, and they’re working on a mystery novel.

Bite-sized Bit of Literary Horror

25 Trumbulls Road - Christopher Locke

Book Review by Katy Haas

Christopher Locke’s 25 Trumbulls Road, 2018 Black River Chapbook Competition Winner, is twenty-two pages of eerie enjoyment. The chapbook reads like five short horror films. Each story is called a “case” and is labeled with a date, which makes them feel a little more real despite remaining firmly planted in the surreal and fantastic. The cases are then broken up into numbered “exhibits,” some of which have been redacted. These redacted sections further steep the stories in mystery—what has been removed and why?

Each story, except one, starts similarly: a family moves into a new home and begins to experience unexplainable events. A woman comes to the newcomer in a dream and leads her into the woods, characters hear source-less voices, objects thrown away return as if tethered to the homeowners. Sure, these are tropes we’ve seen in horror movies for years, but there’s something fresh and poetic about Locke’s little stories. There’s no reliance on special effects or visual jump scares. The horror is all in our imaginations, brought to life by Locke’s straight forward prose. With the short length of the stories, we’re immediately plunged into the darkness with little room to catch our breaths before another tale is introduced.

I read the chapbook while in public, during the middle of the day, sure that if I saved it for my bedtime reading, I’d be too creeped out to sleep soundly. And this is exactly what I want out of a book like this: to be both creeped out and impressed. Locke manages to do both in limited space. 25 Trumbulls Road is a perfectly bite-sized bit of literary horror.

25 Trumbulls Road by Christopher Locke. Black Lawrence Press, February 2020.

About the reviewer: Katy Haas is Assistant Editor at NewPages. Recent poetry can be found in Taco Bell Quarterly, petrichor, and other journals. She regularly blogs at: https://www.newpages.com/.

‘Her Sister’s Tattoo’ by Ellen Meeropol

Her Sisters Tattoo - Ellen MeeropolBook Review by  Jacqueline Sheehan

I’ve been a fan of Ellen Meeropol’s novels for ten years. Her three previous books merged personal drama with social justice. But not until Her Sister’s Tattoo has Meeropol so masterfully grasped the political strife in our country since the 1960’s. And as a true novelist can do, she allows us to experience the turmoil through the intimate lives of two characters whom we come to know and understand.

Rosa and Esther Levin are caught up in the passion and violence of the anti-war protests of 1968 in Detroit. When protest marchers are bloodied by the mounted police, the sisters spontaneously take an action to distract the police that would seem innocuous, even childlike. They hurl apples at the police. But a horse is spooked and a police officer is horribly injured. In that one moment, their lives change in unimaginable ways, driving a brutal wedge between the two sisters that will endure for decades. The dynamics of loyalty to family and one’s conscience become the battleground for a truly American novel.

Late in the book, (I’m not giving anything away here) a character says, “The Levin sisters taught me it’s not your family that determines who you become. It’s not even your abilities. Your choices define you.”

We all make choices every day that define us, but some of us make choices with more lethal consequences. Will our loyalties reside first with our loved ones, or should we sacrifice even our freedom to a larger belief in what is right? Meeropol pulls back the curtain on the lives of two sisters in the midst of this and by doing so, pulls back the curtain on a history of political activism that reverberates through time. For those with an eye for politics and fiction, Ellen Meeropol’s novel will not disappoint.

Her Sister’s Tattoo by Ellen Meeropol. Red Hen Press, April 2020.

About the reviewer: Jacqueline Sheehan, is a New York Times Bestselling author and a psychologist. Her novels include, The Comet’s Tale a novel about Sojourner Truth, Lost & Found, Now & Then, Picture This, The Center of the World, and The Tiger in the House. She also writes essays including the New York Times column, Modern Love. She is one of the founders and former president of The Straw Dog Writers Guild in Western Massachusetts. She teaches workshops at Writers in Progress in Northampton.

’50 Miles’ by Sheryl St. Germain

50 Miles by Sheryl St. GermainBook Review by Karen J. Weyant

Sheryl St. Germain opens her newest book, 50 Miles, with a simple statement: “My son was born into a family cursed with substance abuse.”

It’s this curse St. Germain explores in her collection of intertwining essays that examine the life, the struggles, and the eventual death of her son, Gray. Along the way, she also looks at her own clashes with addiction, struggles that mirror the demons that haunted many of her family members including her father and her brother. Continue reading “’50 Miles’ by Sheryl St. Germain”

‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ Edited by Richard Peabody

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Book Review by Katy Haas

As a writer who is very prone to anxiety and stage fright, I’ve always turned down the opportunity to participate in readings. I can’t help running all the worst case scenarios through my head. This led me to picking up my copy of What Could Possibly Go Wrong? the pocket-sized anthology edited by Richard Peabody, featuring 36 writers sharing their own readings gone wrong.

The anthology starts off on a more serious note. Brett Axel’s reading devolves into a protest as police crash it, assuming the worst of teenage attendees. Abby Bardi’s publicity tour ends prematurely as it coincides with 9/11.

But a majority of these horror stories are less serious and more humorous. Mark Baechtel walks himself into a corner with one bad decision he commits to. Barbara Esstman has a selection of not one but four bad readings, and, luckily, she approaches each of them with levity. Alma Katsu is interrupted by a loud cheerleading practice. Both good weather and bad weather interfere with multiple readings. Tim Wendel must compete against the midnight release of his nemesis: Harry Potter.

Each writer presents their story with lightness and humor. Things didn’t go as planned, but they made it through and are still around writing and participating in more readings. I now find some comfort in the seemingly universality of readings gone awry. Sure, things might go wrong, but at least the experience will be there to laugh at (and possibly write about) later.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Edited by Richard Peabody. Paycock Press, 2019.

‘The Way of the Wind’ by Francine Witte

Way of the Wind by Francine WitteGuest Post by Arya F. Jenkins

In The Way of the Wind, poet and writer Francine Witte’s sparse but packed novella in flash, loss has a dozen names and belongs as much to the present as the past. After being dumped by her boyfriend of five years, the narrator, Lily, finds herself not only overwhelmed with grief but with the memory of other losses and, as she tries to work through them, takes the reader on a frantic, all-too familiar journey.

The Way of the Wind is divided into short, emotionally-charged chapters that grip from the start. Bitter wit provides respite throughout: “Love is a lot like tennis, you know? The ball is everything. Everything. If you’re not watching it, you might as well be sipping tea.”

As is true in the work of any masterful flash fiction writer, the only thing the reader can count on here is the unexpected. As Witte takes the reader on a bumpy ride full of emotional twists, highs and lows, the angst and dramedy feel familiar; the ache, all too real. Lily tries everything to escape her pain, going over the “ifs,” making excuses for the other, fantasizing to keep from acknowledging that her biggest fear—abandonment—has come to pass. The only way out of grief and loss, the narrator seems to suggest, is by uniting with what there is—other humans who care, and acceptance.

The Way of the Wind by Francine Witt. Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019.

Arya F. Jenkins is a poet and writer whose prose has been recently published in About Place Journal, Across the Margins, Cleaver Magazine, Eunoia Review, Five on the Fifth, Flash Fiction Magazine, Metafore Literary Magazine, and Vol. 1 Sunday Stories Series. Her fiction has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her latest poetry chapbook, Love & Poison, was published by Prolific Press in November 2019, and her short story collection Blue Songs in an Open Key (Fomite, 2018) is here: www.aryafjenkins.com. 

‘Wilderness of Hope’ by Quinn Grover

Wilderness of Hope - Quinn GroverGuest Post by Carly Schaelling

Quinn Grover takes readers into a landscape of rivers, wildness, and fly fishing in his essay collection Wilderness of Hope: Fly Fishing and Public Lands in the American West. His descriptions of Idaho, Utah, and Oregon rivers make the reader feel as if they can hear the current and smell the water. Central to this essay collection is a discussion about home, and he suggests that certain geographies can make us feel “young and old, safe and unsure . . . closer to those I love, yet perfectly alone.”

Through punchy short essays consisting solely of dialogue and moments of self-deprecating humor, Grover’s collection interrogates the meaning of wildness and the importance of public lands. One of my favorite moments in this collection is an essay called “The Case for Inefficiency.” Grover recounts a fishing trip that gets off to a rocky start—a forgotten sleeping bag, a popped tire. Instead of giving in to feeling inefficient, he asks whether it is possible to measure wasted time. If we walk somewhere instead of drive, but find ourselves outside breathing the air and being more patient because of it, is our time really wasted? To treat public lands well sometimes “requires us to blaspheme the gospel of efficiency.”

You don’t have to know anything about fishing to enjoy this book. You will escape to places you may have never been to and fall in love with them when giving this collection a read.

Wilderness of Hope by Quinn Grover. Bison Books, September 2019.

About the reviewer: Carly Schaelling is a creative writing student at Utah State University.

Why Book Reviewing Isn’t Going Anywhere

Inside-the-Critics-Circle.jpgA researcher explores the future of a changing practice By Scott Nover, The American Scholar.

Now an assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University in Ontario, Chong researches how fiction book reviews come to fruition, trying to solve the puzzle of why some books get reviewed and why so many more are ignored. Her new book, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times makes the case for the persistence of old-guard professional criticism even in the Internet age.

…It’s a really good question. No one said they were giving good reviews to really bad books, or bad reviews to really good books. It’s more a matter of degree: how much am I going to gush about a book I loved before I worry about sounding stupid and pull back, or how much am I really going to tear into a book before I worry about potential fallout and pull back. And those aren’t just questions about honesty or authenticity, it’s also about what’s the right professional tone to strike when producing cultural journalism.

‘We Are Meant to Carry Water’ by Carlson, Reed, and Dibella Seluja

We Are Meant to Carry Water

Guest Post by Kimberly Ann Priest

“Are we only bone, skin, and urge?” asks the speaker in The Great Square That Has No Corners. I am beginning to wonder if the answer to that question is affirmative. Yes. As I write this, I am sitting in my living room on a Tuesday afternoon in October, mid-way through another semester teaching, and realizing that, this autumn, I have over-committed myself . . . again.

As projects begin to pile up and my network grows, while responsibilities increase and my own poetry demands that I give it more of my attention, I have to let some things go. After four years reading and writing about new works by various authors and publishers, this will be my last review for NewPages. It’s time, once again, to listen to my body and check my urges. And, how fitting that I should end my review history with a review of a collaborative manuscript by three clearly very talented women who have written an elegant collection of poems on assaulted womanhood—a topic that continually shows up in my own work. Drawing from mythology, Tina Carlson, Stella Reed, and Katherine Dibella Seluja have woven a modern (though not modernized) conversation between Helen, Leda, and Lilith, and they have done so with such precision, such tastefulness, such raw beauty. Continue reading “‘We Are Meant to Carry Water’ by Carlson, Reed, and Dibella Seluja”

‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’ by Ocean Vuong

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean VuongGuest Post by Andrew Romriell

Ocean Vuong’s collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, is a masterpiece that illustrates the most vital and sincere hardships of humanity in astonishingly few words. Leaping from free-verse to prose poetry, from stringent format to broken syntax, Vuong fashions here a collection of inclusion.

We open on “Threshold,” a poem where Vuong introduces his themes of body, parenthood, sexuality, and history. He warns us from the very beginning that “the cost of entering a song—was to lose your way back.” Vuong asks us to enter into his words and lose ourselves there. And we do, poem after poem, until we close on Vuong’s book with the penultimate piece, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” In this poem, we read an assumed message from Vuong to Vuong where he tells himself “don’t be afraid,” and to “get up,” and that the most beautiful part of his body “is where it’s headed.” Before this, we’ve read pages of poetry full of pain, fear, and shattering, but here, Vuong embraces himself—and us alongside him.

“Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” like all the poems in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, rings with pain, wonder, regret, and history. Yet, there is also hope here, and I would say this is the theme of Vuong’s work: hope, inclusion, and change. Vuong takes us through a journey, shatters our expectations, holds our hearts, tells us to get up, and that, like him, we can survive the voyage.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Copper Canyon Press, April 2016.

About the reviewer: Andrew Romriell is a creative writing student at Utah State University.

‘Out of Speech’ by Adam Vines

Out of Speech by Adam VinesGuest Post by Adrian Thomson

Adam Vines’s Out of Speech, a poetry collection comprised of ekphrastic poetry based upon famous paintings as well as personal experience, draws on Vines’s travels from southernmost Argentina to the Louvre. Each poem begins by naming the art piece it takes as a subject, then moves toward unpacking their visual elements often through fascinating uses of enjambment.

More than just describing the artwork, Vines peels away surfaces to encounter shavings of shocking humanity lying beneath. In “My View From Here,” a poem responding to Yves Tanguy’s Les Vues, Vines sees an abstract red vista of segmented alien pillars the cancer polyps hidden in a barstool acquaintance he meets by chance outside the gallery. “Holes and Folds,” based on the group portrait The Swing by Jean Honoré Fragonard, finds a narrator focused on the most innocent of the lounging young men in order to question his objectives as a hand slides up a woman’s dress.

Vines’s visual inspection of minutiae leaves his reader questioning the subjects presented in the paintings. Will the awoken businessman in Hopper’s Excursion Into Philosophy leave before his lover stirs? What has made his countenance so dour? What of the open book forgotten on the bed? Is his shoe slipping into, or out of the light? The reader feels unsure even after turning away, and Vines leaves them contemplating in silence.

Out of Speech by Adam Vines. LSU Press, March 2018.

About the reviewer: Adrian Thomson is a creative writing student at Utah State University.

Divine Medicine: A Natural History of Beer

Natural-History-of-Beer.jpgIn the beginning was beer. Well, not quite at the beginning: there was no beer at the Big Bang. Curiously, though, as Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall point out in A Natural History of Beer, the main components of beer—ethanol and water—are found in the vast clouds swirling around the center of the Milky Way in sufficient quantity to produce 100 octillion liters of the stuff…

In America, where there was no such tradition, the movement was more heterogenous. It has found its public, though: by now there are 5,000 craft brewers in the United States producing 20,000 brands of beer. It is one of the bright spots in America’s otherwise dismal recent history.

‘Gifts for the Dead’ by Joan Schweighardt

gifts for dead schweighardtSometimes our best is not good enough. We make mistakes. The most painful ones are those that harm a loved one. Stress and grief leave us in agony, and we play our choice repeatedly wondering if we made the right decision. We cannot let ourselves off the hook either merely because we are human.

In Joan Schweighardt’s Gifts for the Dead, Irishman Jack Hopper arrives home barely alive and without his brother. What could he have done differently? Guilt-ridden, he needs time to sort through the events in South America’s jungle. In the meantime, his mother and his brother’s sweetheart, Nora, nurse him back to health. They wait patiently to learn specifics of Bax, Jack’s brother. To make matters worse, Nora eased Jack’s pain and he liked it. He had always secretly cared for her more than he should have. As time passes and Jack heals, and the two grow closer until they take a trip to South America where Nora then learns the truth.

Schweighardt is masterful at historical fiction and Gifts for the Dead is an example of her skill. Not only does she entertain with accounts that examine the perplexities of being human with its heartening moments and struggles, but she also inspires thoughts about the human condition.

How does one justify bad choices simply because they are human? Why can we not be better than that, and what about the good that comes from bad choices as a result? Will Jack Hopper find that good thing?

Gifts for the Dead is a thoughtful and entertaining read, especially for those who enjoy historical adventure mixed with suspense and a little romance. A wild escapade that thoroughly entertains.

 

Review by Christina Francine
Christina Francine is an enthusiastic author of a variety of work for all ages. When not weaving tales, she teaches academic writing at the college level. She’s also a licensed elementary teacher. Picture books: Special Memory and Mr. Inker. Academic: Journal of Literacy Innovation.

Slapstick

Born over thirty years after its final air date, my knowledge of the TV show I Love Lucy begins and ends in the handful of sporadic reruns I watched at my grandmother’s house on rainy days when I was growing up. Seeing her face twisting up as she acknowledged her latest goof-up on grainy black and white footage, hearing her wail “Ricky,” or seeing her shove chocolates into her mouth all readily come to mind when I hear the TV show’s title, and I can now add Slapstick: The Lucy Poems by Taylor Liljegren to my list of what I think about when I think of I Love Lucy.

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Full Worm Moon

How does one write rejection? Specifically, the violence or indifference of a spouse? One makes a decision to be with a particular person, like be with them in everything—they say, yes—but the contents of that pact disintegrate, sometimes going up in flames quickly, and other times burning slowly and carried off, piece-by-piece, with the wind.

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SPRAWL

Danielle Dutton is the author of three books and wrote the texts for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her first novel, SPRAWL was published by Siglio in 2010, but Wave Books re-released this little masterpiece in 2018, and thank goodness, because, subconsciously, I have been searching everywhere for the present-day Georges Perec. I’m not entirely sure how that sounds, but I promise that I mean nothing but praise for Dutton and her characterization of the modern housewife.

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A People’s Guide to Publishing

Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing is an inspirational and practical guidebook for anyone interested in starting and sustaining a publishing company. Biel, founder of Microcosm Publishing, a small, Portland, Oregon-based press, understands how to build a publishing company from scratch, and with his conversational style he leads readers through every stage of this process and beyond.

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The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down

Howard Mansfield’s new book, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down, is a series of essays describing public and private projects that have deprived people of ownership. Entities behind the projects often claim they’re “acting in the public interest,” writes Mansfield. He goes on to say, “I was especially interested in the emotional toll these projects took. [ . . . ] I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.”

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America, We Call Your Name

I love anthologies. Where else can you read so many diverse, creative ideas linked to a theme and compiled in one electrifying place? In the introduction to the anthology, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience, Murray Silverstein asks, “With our common culture so fractured, what did poetry have to say?” The answers here are emotional and right on target.

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Rail

Rail is epic. Yes, another barbaric yawp in the American song to the self. Full of food stamps and freight trains, Trader Joe’s dumpster diving, bullet shells in sewer drains, brotherhood, and prescription pills for depression, this collection is Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whitman, Sandburg, and O’Hara for the selfie generation. Continue reading “Rail”

You or a Loved One

Winner of the 2017 Orison Fiction Prize, the debut story collection You or a Loved One by Gabriel Houck is sharp, witty, insightful, and truculent. Exposing the underbelly of a post-Katrina Louisiana full of deadbeats, bayou, and folks just trying to survive, the stories swivel between interlinked-stacked flash fiction, script-like treatments for short films, and interior examinations of beautifully flawed characters. The linking thread is that nothing is spoon-fed. Most conclude with blunt endings that leave room for speculation. With vast un-signaled leaps in narrative time and reader-please-speculate-where-to-connect-the-dots, Houck has created a collection where saying less means more, where the randomness of life can be examined, where layers build to great pay-off. Continue reading “You or a Loved One”

Stories for People Who Watch TV

If you’re looking for a break from the tensions in today’s political climate, pick up a copy of Timmy Waldron’s new book, Stories for People Who Watch TV. He’s compiled nine stories, eight of which have already risen to the top of slush piles to be published in literary magazines. The ninth might also stand a good chance, so let’s start with that one, titled “Ouroboros.”

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