NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Ada Limón’s fourth collection of poems, Bright Dead Things, faces discontentment, nostalgia, and longing in the face of a changing environment. The speaker examines her place in a varied world littered with its fried pickles, wide expanse of blue skies, fields full of fireflies and the stars they mirror. Limón brings us a world we recognize. Where the death of a loved one comes flooding back over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, where animals suffer, where we leave small pleasures in old cities, and where life goes on despite all of it. Continue reading “Bright Dead Things”

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) wrote novels, plays, and the Israel Haggadah for Passover still in use and in print for over 40 years. Fig Tree Books, a publisher specializing in titles relating to the American Jewish experience, recently re-issued Levin’s Compulsion, his 1956 bestseller fictionalizing the names (including his own as a reporter for The Chicago Daily News) but not the facts of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1959) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) followed the same author-in-the-nonfiction/novelization crime formula, producing some of their best writing. After subsequent “Crimes of the Century” involving celebrities and troubled young men both rich and poor that the media treats like celebrities, Compulsion is a reflective experience. Continue reading “Compulsion”

A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation is the third chapbook in a series that pairs two female poets, one well-known and the other a rising talent. Molly Peacock is widely anthologized and published in leading literary magazines in addition to her six volumes of poetry. She also helped create New York’s Poetry in Motion program. A decade ago, Peacock mentored Amy M. Clark. Meanwhile Clark’s poetry book won the 2009 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.

Continue reading “A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds”

Here’s the solution for people who love to read fiction but haven’t the time or inclination to plow through a novel or even a standard length short story. The Best Small Fictions 2015 lets you peruse 55 short stories—some are as tiny as a paragraph or a sentence. The longest stories in this digest-size book are four pages. Continue reading “The Best Small Fictions 2015”

Perhaps I should start by saying that City of Ladies is the second book in Sarah Kennedy’s “The Cross and the Crown” series, and I have shamefully not read the first. I started this book believing I might do its review a disservice by not reading the first installment of the series, but by chapter three or four it was clear that City of Ladies can stand on its own. The book follows recently reformed ex-nun, Catherine Havens Overton, and her life with husband William Overton. At her new estate, she has employed her former sisters and cares for them, who have nowhere else to go. When one is found dead, she fears for the safety of the rest of her ladies. But another murder and an investigation will not deter husband William from his plans to gain a place in King Henry VII’s court, in which Catherine plays a key role. With his assurance that the murderer will be found, Catherine reluctantly agrees to leave Overton House to serve Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. Continue reading “City Of Ladies”

The poems in Jonathan Fink’s debut book The Crossing were a decade in the making, and it shows with well-crafted language and imagery that broadens expectations of modern poetic narrative, while still carrying a torch for more formal styles of verse. An artist takes his whole life to construct a debut work, and Fink himself has stated that the main struggle in a first outing is to know when to stop fiddling with the pieces and release them from the nest. But Fink’s patience has paid off and he has made all the right moves here, even garnering an introduction from former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway. Continue reading “The Crossing”

I’ve become more accustomed to seeing flarf poems performed via YouTube. I was beginning to believe that it was a medium designed for the internet purely, a meta commentary on how commentary works in this day. In Touché, Rod Smith weaves the internet generation together with Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams. The old Yeat’s nugget, “Poetry makes nothing happen” is contorted and refracted through all of Smith’s lines to discuss how the great nothing is happening all around us. Continue reading “Touché”

Dario Fo, the 1997 Italian Nobel Laureate for Literature—known for being an actor, playwright, comedian, director, songwriter and political campaigner—has now written his first novel, The Pope’s Daughter, about one of the most infamous ladies in history, Lucrezia Borgia. This novel, which claims to be the real truth, gives another side of Borgia. She will appeal to contemporary women as a real survivor in her turbulent times, but everyone should be able to enjoy the sardonic Greek chorus comments on the machinations of the early popes and dukes ruling Italy during the Renaissance, behavior which has parallels in today’s national and international politics. Continue reading “The Pope’s Daughter”

The story of Famous Baby focuses on Ruth Sternberg, the “First Mother of Mommy Blogging,” and her daughter/blog subject, Abbie. Resentful of her mother’s appropriation of her life for blog material, eighteen-year-old Abbie has kidnapped her dying grandmother to live with her in an effort to prevent Ruth from recording and blogging her death. Ruth is understandably panicked by the disappearance of her mother and daughter, not least of all because without either of them, she is at a loss for subject matter. The plot is further complicated by the appearance of Eric, a sweet, young, aspiring filmmaker whose interest in making a film about Abbie reminds her of her mother a little more than she’d like. She seems to find his interest flattering and off-putting by turns. Continue reading “Famous Baby”

Loneliness: it’s the one thing, above all things, that twenty-three-year-old Mona knows all about. That, and the proper way to clean house. In the first chapter of Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead, “Hole,” Mona is hard at work in Lowell, Massachusetts, splitting her lonesome hours between work as a self-employed housekeeper and a volunteer who provides clean needles to drug addicts. She’s particularly fond of one junkie, whom she dubs “Mr. Disgusting,” eventually falling headlong for his hopelessly fatalistic charm. Continue reading “Pretend I’m Dead”

Reginald Dwayne Betts rose from criminal obscurity to a current man of letters with an award-winning memoir and debut poetry collection, a Pushcart Prize, and now his second book of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era. The title conjures the time period of much of the work—Betts’s childhood in the 1980s—when he participated in a carjacking that put him in prison for the better part of a decade. Charged as an adult, sixteen year-old Betts spent ten days in solitary confinement while waiting for trial, where he discovered poetry after coming across an anthology of black poets being passed around. Soon after, he began writing heavily, and this dedication appears in his vivid imagery that often bites at the core of longstanding societal issues for urban youth. Continue reading “Bastards of the Reagan Era”

Poetry forces its reader to think and think deeply—this is the principle reason I prefer it to other literary forms. Not that other forms fail to inspire deep thought, but that poetry requires its reader to examine, explore, and even research the metaphors and references embedded in the text if said reader wants to harvest the poem for everything its worth. I was so intrigued by Sandra Beasley’s Count the Waves, that I contacted the author herself hoping she would aid me in my exploration, satisfy my questions such as Why is this a “Traveler’s Vade Mecum”? Where is the speaker traveling? How does Elizabeth Barrett Browning influence the work? Am I right to see an inclination toward proverb in the poetry? To my intellectual relief, she answered. . . . Continue reading “Count the Waves”

I love essays, especially the ones that don’t claim anything amazing about themselves, that stick to the quotidian and spend less time exploring stories than thoughts on lives being lived. But there is a danger in reading these sort of quiet, contemplative collections of essays: by the end you feel like you are best friends with the authors. You seem to know all their fears, cares, secret pleasures, weaknesses. You put down the book thinking you could probably buy them the perfect birthday present. But, of course, you don’t really know them and they don’t know you. Continue reading “Watershed Days”

Allison Gruber’s You’re Not Edith is one of the better books I’ve read this year. Her “autobiographical essays” are funny without being comic, personal without being egotistical, crude (because she describes teenage life and dog vomit) without stepping into vulgarity, showing a narrator who is lonely but not melodramatic, tender without becoming sentimental. I read the whole book in one short, luxurious morning, and found that the end came too soon. That the last essay tells the story of a fan who flirts with her after a reading is totally understandable: to read Allison Gruber is to want to read more and to get to know her better. Continue reading “You’re Not Edith”

According to my 1971 two-volume compact Oxford English Dictionary, trauma refers to “a wound, or external bodily injury in general; also the condition caused by this.” This imprecise definition, however, has been narrowed over time and refers more specifically to the emotional shock that follows a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. This shock may last indefinitely and can feel like a reoccurring visitation of the event that caused it in the first place. Jehanne Dubrow’s collection of prose poems titled The Arranged Marriage not only addresses the emotional complexities of arranged marriages, as well as the more specific situation of that marriage including Jewish tradition and life in Central America, but also trauma by its more modern definition. Continue reading “The Arranged Marriage”

The eight stories in Jacob M. Appel’s Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets are engaging, surprising, and often deeply affecting. They sometimes feature bizarre, fantastic details—a man grapples with the real possibility of his mistresses’ impending resurrection, a global cold snap rattles our understanding of global warming—but these features never distract from the human stories at the center of every tale. Continue reading “Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets”

Andrew Brininstool’s stories in Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession are not crude. They’re skillfully told, though some of the happenings within are crude, as in rough or harsh. For example, lots of males get into fistfights, lots of people get drunk, and liaisons don’t go smoothly. Brininstool, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, populates his stories with lively characters, some more likable than others. Continue reading “Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession”

This reviewer knows she might be addressing two possible readers of Elena Ferrante’s four-part series of novels: the ones who are already committed and want to read through the last book, The Story of the Lost Child, and the other, curious newcomer to the series. For the first reader, I will say that this last book does have a very good, real ending and of course is well-worth the effort. The Story of the Lost Child has a new emphasis on politics with characters we’ve grown to know, a glimpse of the effects of feminism on children, the motivations in maintaining success in writing, and as the epilogue called “Restitution” suggests, a final view of the female friendship and disturbing revelations of Elena Greco, our narrator. Continue reading “The Story of the Lost Child”

If bodies are temples, Susan McCarty is an expert demolitionist. In Anatomies, McCarty breaks these temples down, rips through drywall and flesh, tears sexuality and humanity from their hinges, and leaves behind the barebones, the nervous system, the warm, buzzing electrical impulses buried beneath the exteriors of the temples housing her characters. Continue reading “Anatomies”

Prayers for the Living is a sprawling novel, a family epic. Written by the late Alan Cheuse, who was a commentator for NPR, his vast conversational experience is apparent throughout the book, which is told through conversation, narrated by a woman named Minnie Bloch, who chronicles the life of her grandson, Manny, and his joys, his struggles, and his demons. Continue reading “Prayers for the Living”

Joseph Massey mentions in the refreshingly spare notes of his fourth collection Illocality that he first encountered his title word in the Emily Dickinson poem “A nearness to Tremendousness.” Dickinson is an apt predecessor for a poet of such deliberate cerebralness. Yet, for his fine command of image, so is William Carlos Williams, or any number of Asian short-form poets. Indeed it is the relationship between logic and image, mind and world, that drives these poems so evenly through their inquiries, that most characterizes their productive tensions. “We think / ourselves here,” Massey writes to close the opening poem “Parse.” Continue reading “Illocality”

The Guilty by Juan Villoro is the only book of fiction translated into English by this Mexican writer of short stories, novels, plays, essays, and screen scripts. He has been given the Herralde Award in Spain, the Anton Artaud award in France and short-listed for the Reezzori Prize in Italy. In this book of short stories, the individual is in the new global world order, navigating the culture of signs, copies, media, and signifiers of commercial production. Each story is told from a first person point of view, but the “I” does not belong to a specific character with a name, the “I” a transient “I” living in the world through image-manufactured phenomena. Continue reading “The Guilty”

I hate sewing. My mother loves it. To save money during my elementary and middle school years, I wore several of her handmade outfits enduring the shaming glances of classmates who, by the mid-80s, were sporting Guess jeans and Ralph Lauren t-shirts. Unlike Oomen’s adolescent experience, 4-H was less cool during mine, nevertheless, my mother enrolled me in a local club at age eleven so I could learn to make my own skirts and, to this day, I can sew a wicked tunnel stitch (though I seldom find good reason to exercise this skill). Continue reading “Love, Sex, and 4-H”

You might want to bone up on the Arabian Nights stories, particularly Scheherazade and her sister Dinarzade’s tale, before delving into Jo Ann Clark’s poetic take on the siblings. In 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life, Clark’s first book, she mixes the fable with some prehistoric fellows and a dash of mythology to present a really interesting set of works. Confession: I had to look up some words, such as viviparity, monotreme, Hypohippus, Merychippus, and mokoro. But once that was in order, a second reading of Clark’s book brought it to life. Continue reading “1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life”

Wolff’s One Morning— sat in my possession in a very raw state. The captivating parts of the poems were laid out and exposed. It was easy to see the mechanics and the utility of every phoneme and word. This is a highly refined piece of work from a woman very much in control of her craft. The level of Rebecca Wolff’s control shines through in the entire piece. There is juxtaposition in each sentence and stanza. “Traveller, / Your journey has been long // and sectional.” Those introductory lines in “Arcadia (et in . . . est)” bear the weight of repetition. They are full of heart and compassion, yet still quite cerebral. There are always dualities to be explored and explained. Wolff demonstrates the relation between the two as often as she can locate it: “By night everything seems impossible // By day, by extension, everything: possible.” Continue reading “One Morning—”

Elaine Equi’s latest book, Sentences and Rain, feels like a confident drift. There is so much control and purpose in the playful word ideas. She must be listed among many of the greats. The insights into humanity that are contained in each and every poem remind the reader of the wonder tucked in every corner of life. The words and format are gentle and full of utility. This is the way of those who hold the passage. Equi has pushed her pen for many years. The development is original and organic. One need not read Equi’s previous writing to get the impression that this is a writer and an observer of life in the peak of their critique. Continue reading “Sentences and Rain”

The world seems bigger than what it is. The twenty pieces of short fiction in Everywhere Stories reminds us of this as it closes the gap between countries and cultures, successfully condensing 24,901 miles into a 234 page book. Forget language barriers, plane tickets for the price of a new car, or time constraints—it’s possible to travel the world without ever leaving the comfort of your favorite reading nook. Continue reading “Everywhere Stories”

The back cover of this book will give readers the most bare-bone details of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor; that Job and Ifi are a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, that Job, “Mr. Doctor,” isn’t actually a doctor, and that this lie puts a strain on their marriage and their life at large. But Julie Iromuanya’s novel is about more than a struggle to keep up appearances. It delves into the nitty gritty details of a culture, a marriage, two people unto themselves, displaced in a strange land that is famed to provide opportunity and riches. From the very first pages, it is painfully clear that this life is not what either Job or Ifi had pictured for themselves. Continue reading “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor”

Kurt Beals’s award winning translation of Swiss short story writer Regina Ullmann’s 1921 The Country Road will appeal mostly to mature readers who find themselves uncomfortable in contemporary fiction, seeking instead something old-fashioned. This is a different collection, unlike any short stories written today, more like vignettes, reveries, or sketches of rural peasant life in small villages, not grim but also not sentimental. It is not a page-turner; the reader will want to savor the beautiful prose and insights into human nature. Plot and character development are minimal, motivation and “backstory” in all but one case not given, lending a sense of mystery to the account. A repeated stylistic series of dots or ellipses suggests the steady continuum of life. Continue reading “The Country Road”

A girl with blue skin is found drowning in a lake. A fifteen-year-old girl named Audrey saves her. Audrey’s mother, Irene, stands by. So do Irene’s friends, Magda and Libby. So do Audrey’s friends, Rebecca and Caroline. Audrey is the only one who acts; the rest of them watch. Audrey isn’t only the one who saved The Blue Girl, which is a remarkable thing for a fifteen year-old to do in itself, but she is the only one who attempted to save her. This singular moment—this moment of action and inaction—is the foundation for The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos. This event propels the story forward—how these six characters interpret this event, and thus in the process, how they come to understand themselves. Continue reading “The Blue Girl”

“The Girl on the Swing,” the first novella of this two-story collection by Peter Grandbois, fittingly opens with a Kafka quote, because this is very much a story of metamorphosis. Not only does “the girl,” timid but precocious twelve-year-old Isabel, undergo a dramatic physical transformation, but so do the other three members of her family: her mother, father, and her brother, each in their own unsettling way. Isabel’s dramatic and quite gruesome transformation triggers a domino effect throughout the family; the panic caused by her transformation highlights her family’s dysfunction, which soon snowballs into a full-blown collapse. Continue reading “The Girl on the Swing and At Night in Crumbling Voices”

The King of the Sea Monkeys is a novel of two parts. The first part is about Paul, a young high school teacher, a loving father to Jessie and husband to Lilian. The second part is about Saul, whom Paul “becomes” after surviving a gunshot to the head upon being thrust into the middle of a gas station robbery. Wrong place, wrong time, and just like that, Paul becomes Saul. Continue reading “The King of the Sea Monkeys”

Running beneath each story in Liz Prato’s collection, Baby’s on Fire, is a murmuring chaos, the kind that seems to bubble beneath the surface either as the aftermath of or building up to a full-blown eruption. But those eruptions never come to readers in the span of the narratives. They’ve already happened, or this story is the building up to it, or it may never happen at all, and what we witness in these lives is precisely what we witness in the lives of people who surround us on a daily basis. Whole lives lived, the full details of which we have absolutely no awareness, but that simmer there, just below the surface. Just like our own lives in relation to others. Continue reading “Baby’s on Fire”

“The body as sculpture,” Testament—G. C. Waldrep’s book-length poem—begins, and with it we feel the steadying gesture that prefaces any great feat—fingers at one’s temples, eyes closed, the breath held. Continue reading “Testament”

FitzPatrick’s debut collection, published by the Vandalia Press imprint of West Virginia University Press, consists of nine powerful stories about the fragility of hope, the devastation of grief, and the precarious balance of family harmony that lies between the two. Four of the nine stories feature the same characters, allowing us to see growth, and sometimes the lack thereof, in the lives of these individuals. Continue reading “My Pulse Is an Earthquake”

Even before turning the first page of Khaty Xiong’s beautifully composed chapbook Deer Hour, we are given a visual clue as to what we’ll find inside. The cover image shows a large and noble buck suspended between an expanse of grey sky above and yellow field below. The animal, balanced between the two seemingly endless landscapes, defies and resists enclosure. Much the same way, Xiong’s poems refuse to be confined to definitive beginnings and endings, and instead hover, suspended on each page. Continue reading “Deer Hour”

“Been working on my abstractions now / for over a lifetime” is the very opening line of the book. This line holds true through the duration of Jon Curley’s Hybrid Moments,​which is of the school that plain language ought to be reserved for journalism. Though it is a modern work, influenced by much in the contemporary realm, it rings in the manner of the classic romantics. The language is ornate and the thoughts are powerful. There are many threads that must be teased from one another. Continue reading “Hybrid Moments”

Author Geoffrey Peerson Leed is a voice from the future. Other than a webpage issued by The Market Optimization Bureau labeling him “subversive,” there is his “lost work” Partisans. Leed too is a “ghostly neighbor” whose fate is unknown. M. Allen Cunningham is responsible for the book’s publication, presented in accordance with the author’s wishes “as indicated in manuscripts discovered after his disappearance.” Readers who favor either the political dystopias of Orwell or the zombie-apocalypse works of Max Brooks will be interested in what Leed has to say. Continue reading “Partisans”

When I finished Julia Cohen’s I Was Not Born I had the following reactions, more or less simultaneously: That really ends with a punch. I am not so sure what just happened there. I want to try something like this. Even from the first paragraph of the first essay, I knew that this was not going to be a traditional project. Continue reading “I Was Not Born”

I read half of the poetry in John Philip Drury’s newest book of poems Sea Level Rising while situated on a large towel on St. Augustine Beach along the Atlantic in Northern Florida. It was the ideal setting for contemplating as Drury expressed his love for the sights and sounds of the ocean. “I miss the rising tides,” he reminisces in the book’s title poem, “that bash the docks / and spatter brackish water in my face.” Continue reading “Sea Level Rising”

Overwinter, Jeremy Pataky’s debut poetry collection, examines the speaker’s isolation and solace in the vast, untamed nature of the Alaskan wilderness. Throughout the collection, the speaker spends his time between a developed city, with its electricity and human companionship, and the natural Alaskan landscape filled with its braided streams, unpredictable wildlife, and endless illusions of light and depth. Continue reading “Overwinter”

A little bit travelogue, a little bit art history, and a little bit heartbreaking memoir, Michael White’s Travels in Vermeer explores the author’s fascination with the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, a fascination that takes him around Europe and America. Traveling to Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Washington D.C., New York, and London in the course of a year—while at the same time dealing with a painful divorce and custody battle, remembering the difficulties of his childhood and the alcoholism of his early adulthood, trying to get back into the dating scene, and remembering the brief, passionate romance with his first wife, who died of cancer—White gives long meditations on Vermeer’s paintings in lyric detail, becoming an intense eye through which we the readers also get to see them. Continue reading “Travels in Vermeer”

Risk Management Studies is a very reasonable riot. Noel Sloboda is playful through and through, and it is refreshing to read an entire chapbook that stays consistently hilarious. While the collection has a modernist slant, it never strays into critical territory. Continue reading “Risk Management Studies”

Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles is a dense work wrapped in a short body. Originally from Michigan, the Midwest comes through Upton’s poetry in a similar way to a classic James Wright poem. It is there when she wants it to be, but she has the control to stray from it when necessary. Many of these poems are closer in scope to Charles Wright, the current Poet Laureate, and readers of her 2005 publication Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Gluck, and Carson will see how they’ve influenced her writing throughout this collection. Continue reading “Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles”

“This letter is about our lives simultaneously, and the mess of memories and body parts that emerges from our selves.” Thus writes the contemporary narrator to Herculine Barbin, an intersexed person born 1838, given a surgical sex reassignment which led to his/her suicide at twenty-nine in 1868. There are about fifteen ways to have an intersexed body, from not XX (female) and not XY (male) to complete gonadal dysgenesis. An intersexed body automatically makes one an intersexed person. The intersexed person does not fall within the guidelines of the social organization based on the clear-cut sexes, male and female, which, in turn, is amenable to the prescribed roles of gender. Continue reading “Dear Herculine”

“This is not the story of Katrina, of flood waters rising and then receding,” the prologue of The Parish: An AmeriCorps Story lets readers know. One could argue that it’s not even “An AmeriCorps Story” either. The Parish is a story of finding purpose and direction in a place that feels devoid of nearly everything—a story of finding purpose and direction in one’s self. Continue reading “The Parish”

In a family saga that spans two countries, a half-century, and three generations, Shelley Ettinger’s Vera’s Will is both historical document and social commentary, deftly couched in beautifully written fiction. The story opens with Randy, a young lesbian, reflecting on her past while attending her Grandmother Vera’s funeral. It is at this emotionally tumultuous service where Randy meets and reacquaints with her grandmother’s friends that she has a startling realization: both her deceased grandmother and her favorite aunt are also gay. Continue reading “Vera’s Will”

Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel opens with Adam, a 26-year-old drug-addicted burnout, fleeing from New York City to Israel. Adam’s caretaker and closest companion, his grandfather, has recently died. During the airplane ride, Adam broods on whether American authorities are following him. Experiencing withdrawals and toting an odd assortment of belongings, including an elaborate gold brooch, he volunteers to work on a kibbutz. He’s searching for someone. The circumstances of his grandfather’s death, the significance of the brooch, and the identity of whom Adam is searching for drive the thoughtfully plotted Safekeeping. Continue reading “Safekeeping”

Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize in 2013, is a slim volume of seven short stories about young adults facing teenage pregnancy, homelessness, prostitution, the death of a child on his babysitter’s watch, and so on. “Shelter,” the first story in the book, is an odd choice for an opening, in that the story largely relies on the limited shock value of having homeless teenagers for its protagonists. Reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s project to represent the lives of young poor women from the South, Jones’s story is less angry, but similarly features young characters who hide their vulnerability behind tough facades and speech that is likewise patina’d with derogatory slang. Continue reading “Unaccompanied Minors”

My Feelings, the aptly primal title of poet and memoirist Nick Flynn’s fourth poetry collection, appropriately marks the book as the end product of long winnowing—an unequivocally subjective appraisal of life’s equivocations. In My Feelings, Flynn brings a memoirist’s robust conception of personal history to the page, crafting finely textured poems about what it means to live in the ever-growing aftermath called the present. To underscore the subjective nature of his collection, Flynn even includes a disclaimer telling readers that “[t]he word ‘my’ in the title is meant to signify the author.” Continue reading “My Feelings”