This Morning the Mountain: Poems by Judy Rowe Michaels Cherry Grove Collections, March 2023
Judy Rowe Michaels’ sixth bout of cancer coincided with a deeper grief: her husband’s sudden death, the end of a forty-four-year marriage. Yet the poems in This Morning the Mountain, in their various turnings, reveal unexpected moments of comfort, resilience, even laughter: the pet cat’s growling capture of a broiled shrimp, “like the fierce hunter he was meant to be”; an arresting improvisation by a favorite jazz pianist; a prisoner’s empathic insight about a poem—“I guess cancer could be a prison too.” Ranging from villanelle to prose poem to irregular stanzas that surge, stumble, or sprawl across a page, these poems find the music to explore not only our natural fears of loneliness, insufficiency, heartbreak, and death but the celebration of love.
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In Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions, interlocking stories form a novel that follows four Nigerian girls as they become women trying to determine who they should be and what role their lives should play in the history of their country. In fact, the first story begins in 1897, well before any of the girls are born, and ends with a story set in 2050 with the remaining women meeting to help one of them solve a significant problem. On the one hand, this collection examines the positives and negatives of Nigeria’s history and culture, as it shows the effects of the Biafran war, the rise of Evangelical churches and anti-LGBTQ laws, the rich culinary connections, and the deep family relationships. In the final story, Ogunyemi even uses her background in medicine to critique the American healthcare system, especially around medical debt. More than anything, though, Ogunyemi’s work reveals richly developed characters who try to negotiate what it means to be a Nigerian woman, always relying on their friends to help them through triumph and tragedy. These characters care deeply for one another and, mostly, for their families, so they are willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary so that the others’ lives can be better, no matter what political and cultural shifts occur.
Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi. Amistad, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Ellie is Cool Now by Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren Forever, March 2023
Ellie is Cool Now is the result of Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren ‘plopping’ an adult romcom chapter onto Wattpad, which resulted in a favorable readership and a Watty Award. The story follows TV writer Ellie Jenkins, who worked her butt off to put her nerdy, outcast teen years behind her. The irony being that she now works for a hit show about popular high school kids when she was So. Not. Cool. And she’s been offered the promotion of a lifetime—if she attends her reunion. But Ellie’s memory of High School Hell isn’t nearly as traumatic as the reality. No one at the reunion is what Ellie expected. Not her ex-best friend and not her secret crush. The only way she’s going to survive this whole weird ordeal is by fixing her bad high school karma, kissing the one who got away, and getting the hell out of Ohio for good. But Ellie’s discovering that in real life, she can’t just rewrite the script.
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Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke First Second, August 2023
In Ben Hatke’s graphic novel Things in the Basement, Milo is sent by his mother to fetch an errant sock from the basement of the historic home they’ve just moved into. It was supposed to just be a normal basement—some storage boxes, dust—the usual basement stuff. But when Milo finds a door in the back that he’s never seen before, it turns out that the basement of his house is enormous. In fact, there is a whole world down there. As Milo travels ever deeper into the Basement World, he meets the many Things that live in the shadows and gloom, and he learns that to face his fears he must approach even the strangest creatures with kindness.
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Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master Ed. Dana Leven and Adele Elise Williams The Unsung Masters Series, June 2023
Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master is the fourteenth volume in the Unsung Masters Series and includes both a large selection of his very best poems and appreciations from José Angel Araguz, Jim Bogen, Victoria Chang, Amy Gerstler, Garrett Hongo, Daniel Meyers, Barry Sanders, Ari Sherman, Maria Simon, Sean Singer, and others. Edited by Dana Leven and Adele Elise Williams and published with financial support by the Nancy Luton Fund and the University of Houston English Department in collaboration with Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades.
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Nervosa by Hayley Gold Street Noise Books, April 2023
Hayley Gold’s graphic memoir Nervosa recognizes anorexia nervosa as an eating disorder. It is not a phase, a fad, or a choice. It is a debilitating illness, manifested in a distorted relationship with food, but which actually has more to do with issues of control. It is often a puzzle for doctors, therapists, parents, and friends. And so those who suffer from it are belittled, or tragically misunderstood, not only by society but by the healthcare system meant to treat it. Nervosa is a no-holds-barred, richly textured portrait of one young woman’s experience. In her vividly imagined retelling, Gold lays bare a callous medical system seemingly disinterested in the very patients it is supposed to treat and traces how her own life was irrevocably damaged by both the system and her own disorder, offering readers a remarkably candid exploration of the search for hope in the darkness.
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Clair loved Wally but lately didn’t like him very much.
Wally is reminiscent of Jim Harrison’s Johnny Lundgren and Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski, guys who understand the cost of doing things the way they do because they are nothing if not self-aware.
The Funny Moon is set in a small New England college town where Wally grew up and to which he retreated in his late twenties. Lincoln renders it with a clarity that borders on virtual reality, and it becomes one of the book’s leading characters. After a few chapters, readers will feel like they grew up there, too. Inevitably, the walls are closing in on Wally. His main client wants social media advertising, a subject Wally knows nothing about. His wife Claire is running out of patience with him, or maybe she is outgrowing him. Even some of his lifelong chums are looking askance at him.
This is a classic coming-of-middle-age story, but Lincoln sails past every cliché with scenes so well-played the ending is one readers could not have predicted. The Funny Moon is sun-dappled and bleak, both a “What a ride” and “What the fuck?” As Jim Harrison puts it in Warlock, “The trouble is that no one gets to be anyone else.”
The Funny Moon by Chris Lincoln. Rootstock Publishing, June 2023.
Dave Greeley worked with the author for several years in the early 1980s. He is a communications consultant to clients in education, pharma, and high technology.
Tell Me What You See by Terena Elizabeth Bell Whiskey Tit, December 2022
Tell Me What You See, the debut short story collection by Terena Elizabeth Bell, offers readers ten experimental works about coronavirus quarantines, climate change, the January 6th invasion on the US Capitol, and other events from 2020-2021. The title story “Tell Me What You See” is a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) City Artist Corps winner, and the book is dedicated in part to Detroit-area Congresswoman Haley Stevens who was an inspiration for the author.
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Craft: A Memoir by Tony Trigilio Marsh Hawk Press, September 2023
Tony Trigilio’s Craft: A Memoir is an exploration of the writer’s craft through a series of short, linked personal essays. When writers talk about “craft,” they frequently focus on clinical, literary-dictionary terms such as language, narrative, structure, image, tone, and voice, among others. Craft: A Memoir is an effort to understand craft through discussions of the direct experience of writing itself—through stories of how Trigilio became a writer. Each chapter features an anecdote from the author’s development as a writer that illustrates craft elements central to his body of work.
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The Liberators: A Novel by E. J. Koh Tin House Books, November 2023
At the height of the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with an infant and Sungho’s overbearing mother-in-law. Adrift in a new country, Insuk grieves the loss of her past and her divided homeland, finding herself drawn into an illicit relationship that sets into motion a dramatic saga and echoes for generations to come. From the Gwangju Massacre to the 1988 Olympics, flashbacks to Korean repatriation after Japanese surrender, and the Sewol ferry accident, E. J. Koh’s exquisitely drawn portraits and symphonic testimony from guards, prisoners, perpetrators, and liberators spans continents and four generations of two Korean families forever changed by fateful past decisions made in love and war.
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Chain-Gang All-Stars is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel. After his stellar 2018 story collection Friday Black, this is an important book, but it’s also a good, if challenging, read. He creates an America similar to our contemporary one, but he’s updated some of the technology and introduced a new extreme sport, one in which those whom the state has incarcerated battle each other to the death. What hasn’t changed, though, is the racism and sexism and brutality found within the carceral system. Adjei-Brenyah highlights both Americas through the portrayal of his characters, but also through footnotes that remind the reader that, while his work is fiction, the suffering endured by so many is absolutely real. This mixture of what happens in twenty-first-century America and what has happened throughout American history along with his fictional world that builds upon those realities constantly reminds readers that what happens in the prison system today—especially the for-profit sections of it—is effectively no different from having prisoners kill one another for entertainment. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxx” Stacker—the two main characters—try to create a relationship in the midst of this oppression and abuse, and they also work to show America what could be different, just as Adjei-Brenyah does in his novel.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Pantheon Books, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories edited by Richard Z. Santos Arte Público Press, June 2023
This riveting collection of horror stories—and four poems—contains a wide range of styles, themes, and authors. Creepy creatures roam the pages, including La Llorona and the Chupacabras in fresh takes on Latin American lore, as well as ghosts, zombies, and shadow selves. Migrants continue to pass through Rancho Altamira where Esteban’s family has lived for generations, but now there are two types: the living and the dead. A young man returns repeatedly to the scary portal down which his buddy disappeared. A woman is relieved to receive multiple calls from her cousin following Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, but she is stunned to later learn her prima died the first night of the storm! There’s plenty of blood and gore in some stories, while others are mysterious and suspenseful. Contributors include Ann Davila Cardinal, V. Castro, Ruben Degollado, Richie Narvaez, Lilliam Rivera, and Ivelisse Rodriguez.
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October Journey: Poems by Margaret Walker 50th Anniversary Edition Aquarius Press, July 2023
Celebrating a beloved collection’s return after 50 years, October Journey, first published in 1973, is being reissued with the addition of works not seen in decades. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander (July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.
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Read My Lips: Poems by Charles K. Carter David Roberts Books, November 2022
Charles K. Carter’s Read My Lips is a collection of poetry that follows the metamorphosis of romance; journeying from adolescent crushes to casual intimate encounters to marriage and heartbreak. Carter utilizes a variety of poetic forms including blank verse, free verse, ghazal, haiku, nirat, and prose poem as well as more unconventional forms.
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The Act of Contrition & Other Poems by Joseph Bathanti EastOver Press, July 2023
The Act of Contrition by Joseph Bathanti is a series of linked stories and one novella that continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti’s earlier award-winning volume of stories, The High Heart. Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, these fourteen unforgettable stories—a mélange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver)—are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.
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True for the Moment: Poems by Ian Ganassi David Roberts Books, April 2023
The poems in True for the Moment by Ian Ganassi address the transient and impermanent nature of internal life as it intersects with life in the world. This impermanence is part and parcel of the deceptive and shifting performance of language. From “Your Last Chance”: “Nope, no number of dictionaries can save you now.” Nothing, not even love, is free from the conditional nature of experience: “All she remembers after all these years/Is how good I was in bed.” (“Marking the Blues”). One of the last poems offers a ray of hope: “There’s a kind of salvation in the practice of the mundane,” “And practice makes perfect, or at least it can contribute / Some sort of equanimity to the dementia reality is known for…” Art and artistic technique alone are reliable, as well as the comedy that is enacted in the poems.
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Gordita: Built Like This by Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz Black Josei Press, January 2023
Gordita: Built Like This is an autobiographical comic by Daisy “Draizys” Ruiz. The 28-page color comic follows Gordita, a young Mexican-American teenager who lives in The Bronx. She’s judged for having no ass by classmates, strangers, and even family. Gordita struggles with low self-esteem and body dysmorphia. But, through her friendships with other girls who are also getting bullied and mentorship with her guidance counselor, Gordita, begins to speak up for herself and see that she is more than just her body. Ruiz started this comic as a 6-page black and white comic called “Built Like Spongebob,” which was created for and displayed at NYU’s exhibition, ¡Oye! Cuéntame un Cuento. Daisy’s first solo exhibit in Casita Maria in The Bronx featured pages from Gordita as well.
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Petrochemical Nocturne: A Novel by Amos Jasper Wright IV Livingston Press, August 2023
The Mississippi River. HAZMAT. Boxing. Suicide by cop. New Orleans Saints football. Chemical explosions. The Angola Prison rodeo. Chlorine gas ghost ships. Through these symbols and themes, readers learn about Toussaint and his formative experiences in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “Petrochemical Nocturne” results in an indictment of what Toussasint describes as “that dystopian haunted carnival cruise line called America.” A discursive and often surreal exploration of environmental racism, southern history, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, inter-generational trauma, and climate change, Petrochemical Nocturne is both paean and eulogy for the formerly enslaved communities of Cancer Alley, the erasure of an entire people from a poisoned landscape.
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Romance Language: Poems by Amy Glynn Able Muse Press, January 2024
Winner of the 2022 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry, Amy Glynn’s Romance Language is a wellspring of culture, nature, natural phenomena, myths, esoterica. A kaleidoscope of sciences and disciplines—spanning archeology, acoustics, botany, zoology, psychology, cosmology, meteorology, mythology—are freely juxtaposed with the bliss of romance gained to longing for the one lost, the celebration of nature and the teeming creatures therein to hope for their enduring sustenance. A logophilic showcase, Romance Language transports the reader into a sensory and cerebral world of the real and imagined, ever reaching for stimulus, wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment.
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A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights Laertes Press, September 2023
These texts in the wake of invasion, written by the members of the Theater of Playwrights, Kyiv, in spring, summer, and fall of 2022, have a documentary thrust. Reporting from diverse places in Ukraine, from Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, from occupied Kherson, from the front itself, and locations farther afield in countries of refuge; employing diverse modes of expression: poetry, screenplay, dialogue, diary, diatribe, comedy, short story, recollection, each is a singular response to a seismic and agonizing shift. Each is an act of defiance as well, an assertion of the full human weight, of the integrity of a people.
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Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner Translated by Francesca Bell Red Hen Press, August 2023
Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems, translated by Francesca Bell. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life.
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Generation Exile: The Lives I Leave Behind by Rodrigo Dorfman Arte Público Press, March 2023
Rodrigo Dorfman, the son of prominent dissidents, was six years old when his family fled Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship a month after the CIA-backed coup in 1973. They fled to Argentina, and then to Havana, Paris, Amsterdam and finally Bethesda, Maryland. Mapping the memory of exile, he remembers the contradiction of living with his seething anger at losing his home and his resistance to settling down. Rebellion was an ancestral badge of honor he wore proudly. At 18, he returned to Chile and fought against the fascist dictatorship, running for his life with bullets and tear gas flying by. Dorfman’s involvement in the resistance movement there planted the seeds for his future life as a community-centered documentary filmmaker. His restless search for a place to call his own led to his wandering—around the United States, to Morocco and Turkey and the Path of Sufism. He finally made a home in the American South, where he became a “Latino” and found kinship with other immigrants who settled there. This compelling narrative recounts a displaced man’s life-long quest to establish family, roots and a sense of belonging by bearing witness to what he calls the “Nuevo South.”
No God Like the Mother: Stories by Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher Forest Avenue Press, April 2023
Kesha Ajọsẹ-Fisher’s debut collection of nine short stories, No God Like the Mother, follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope. Set around the world–the bustling streets of Lagos, the arid gardens beside the Red Sea, an apartment in Paris, and the rain-washed suburbs of the Pacific Northwest–this collection of nine stories is a masterful exploration of life’s uncertainty. Ajọsẹ-Fisher was born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and returned to the United States with her family in the early nineties. She won the Oregon Book Awards’ 2020 Ken Kesey Prize for this collection.
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The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories by Walter Weinschenk Kelsay Books, February 2023
The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories includes a wide sampling of Walter Weinschenk’s writing, much of which has appeared in print over the course of the last few years. Though the stories and poems vary in terms of length and style, there is a singular focus. The book is, essentially, a rumination upon life, death, and the search for meaning. Most of these pieces are speculative in the sense that there is absent any reference to a particular location, time frame, or historical context. However, these poems and stories, dreamlike in nature, focus upon essential issues with which we grapple throughout our lives: loss, loneliness, meaning, and mortality. The common thread is the narrator’s voice which is, essentially, an inner voice, a voice of consciousness, that engages us in a consideration of what it means to be human.
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An Influencer’s World: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Social Media Influencers and Creators by Caroline Baker and Don Baker University of Iowa Press, June 2023
An Influencer’s World: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Social Media Influencers and Creators by Caroline Baker and Don Baker explores the business of influencing built around likes and hate, which can take a huge psychological toll on those who choose to play the game. Their work pulls back the curtain and shines a light on the often-misunderstood realities of this dynamic industry. Featuring dozens of interviews with trending influencers, CEOs, leading industry insiders, brands, mental health professionals, and celebrities, this book provides an unconventional look at both the business side of influencing and the personal lives of influencers and creators.
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Under a Future Sky by Brynn Saito Red Hen Press, August 2023
Under a Future Sky is Brynn Saito’s poetic gathering of generations, a performance with ghosts anchored in a journey with her father to the desert prison where, over eighty years ago, her grandparents met and made a life. Born of a personal ache, an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s journey unfolds in lyric correspondences and epistolary poems that sing with rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love. In these works, descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. To enter this book is to enter the slipstream of nonlinear time, where mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. Altogether, the work enacts a dialogue between the past and the present; the radical ancestor and the future child; and the desert prison and the family garden, where Saito’s father diligently gathers stones.
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Do I Belong Here? / ¿Es este mi lugar? by René Colato Laínez Illustrations by Fabricio Vanden Broeck Piñata Books, May 2023
An immigrant boy stands “in the middle of a whirlwind of children,” and wonders where he is supposed to go. Finally, a woman speaks to him in a language he doesn’t understand and takes him to his classroom. A boy named Carlos helps orient him, but later when he reads aloud, everyone laughs at him. And when he gets an “F” on an assignment, he is sure “I do not belong here.” Award-winning children’s book author René Colato Laínez teams up again with illustrator Fabricio Vanden Broeck to explore the experiences of newcomers in schools and affirm that yes! They do belong. With beautiful acrylic-on-wood illustrations depicting children at school, this bilingual kids’ book by a Salvadoran immigrant tells an important story that will resonate with all kids who want nothing more than to belong.
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Plums for Months: A Memoir of Nature and Neurodivergence by Zaji Cox Forest Avenue Press, May 2023
As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats. She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother. Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
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Player’s Vendetta A Willie Cuesta Mystery by John Lantigua Arte Público Press, March 2023
Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police Department detective-turned-private investigator, is swinging in his hammock, estimating the number of mango daquiris he can squeeze from a ripe piece of fruit about to fall from his tree. He’s also waiting for a prospective client who refused to discuss her case over the phone. Ellie Hernandez hasn’t seen her fiancé, Roberto “Bobby” Player, in ten days, and she wants Willie to find him. Bobby has been obsessed with the suspicious death of his parents more than thirty-five years ago in Cuba, and he recently went to the island to find their killers. Only six years old when they were murdered, he was living in the United States, where they were supposed to join him. He was one of the “Peter Pan” kids smuggled out when Fidel Castro took over. Willie learns the Players controlled one of the most successful casinos on the island and a large sum of money—half a million dollars—disappeared with their deaths. His investigation reveals an assortment of suspicious characters who were in Havana when the Players were killed, including a former Cuban spy now living in Little Havana, Mafia gangsters involved in gambling institutions and even an undercover US intelligence agent.
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The Hungers of the World: New & Collected Later Poems by John Morgan Salmon Poetry, April 2023
The Hungers of the World: New & Collected Later Poems by John Morgan joins its companion volume, The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems, published in 2019, to provide a comprehensive gathering of this Alaskan poet’s work. Originally from New York, Morgan moved with his family to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1976 to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. In 1982, he and his wife Nancy built a house overlooking the Tanana River with a long view south to the Alaska Range. Morgan has written a series of poems which feature that view as it changes month by month through the seasons. Morgan’s family features prominently in his work as well as larger topics that deal with history and the arts. The final section of The Hungers of the World contains two long poems: The Wedge and River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir. The latter takes the reader on an adventurous raft trip down the Copper River in Southcentral Alaska with the Indian mystic poet Kabir as Morgan’s imaginary companion and spiritual guide.
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Poetry
Alone, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books Bar of Rest, Sara Epstein, Kelsay Books Bridge at the End of the World, Scott T. Starbuck, Blue Light Press Broken Metronome, Connie Post, Glass Lyre Press The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories, Walter Weinschenk, Kelsay Books Dreaming in Cantera, Bonnie Wolkenstein, WordTech Editions The Dreams of Gods, J.R. Solonche, Kelsay Books EtC, Laura Mullen, Solid Objects excisions, Hilary Plum, Black Lawrence Press Expert Terrain, Diane Schenker, Word Poetry Fig Season, Joan E. Bauer, Turning Point Glass to Sand, John Van Dreal, Cherry Grove Collections gulp/gasp, Serena Piccoli, Moira Books Hearts, Joanne Corey, Kelsay Books
Best Material for the Artist in the World – Albert Bierstadt: A Biography in Poems by Kenneth Chamlee Stephen F. Austin University Press, March 2023
This poetic biography tracks the life and career of landscape artist Albert Bierstadt, whose 19th-century representations of the American West earned him wealth and international acclaim. These narrative, lyric, and ekphrastic poems touch the momentum of the developing west, the devastation of native tribes and the great buffalo herds, as well as the resiliency of Bierstadt’s art in times of environmental awareness and expansionist reappraisal.
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Embarrassed of the (W)Hole by Panoply Performance Laboratory Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023
Embarrassed of the (W)Hole is an operating manual for an opera-of-operations. Oriented around formal and modal resistances to “wholism” as complex foil and the proposition to embarrass, the book includes scores-for-scores, theoretical frames, process notes, and a User Survey meant to be “operated” and “used” (specifically, rigorously) to stage and situate pertinent contexts, conditions, and embodiments of and for projected future operations.
Panoply Performance Laboratory is a thinktank, organizational entity, and flexible performance collective. Founded in 2006 by Esther Neff and co-directed with Brian McCorkle through 2018, PPL has also existed as a physical lab site (“institution as a verb”) in Brooklyn, hosting projects and performances by artists and thinkers from around the world.
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HIGHER by Robert Stewart Press Americana, April 2023
Winner of the 2022 Prize Americana, the poems in HIGHER by Robert Stewart are at once direct and resonant, celebratory of the natural world and of spiritual aspirations. Rising from a working-class, blue-collar sensibility, these pieces range from a short work about using a sledgehammer on a street crew to a multi-part longer work about animals in changing nature. These lyric poems include subtle metrics and enough narrative to drive events, often with elegiac references to a military vet friend, a brother, a Sicilian grandmother, and literary heroes. Their focus ultimately returns to hope and care for children, often with no small amount of humor.
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Tierra, Tierrita / Earth, Little Earth by Jorgue Tetl Argueta Illustrations by Felipe Ugalde Alcantara Piñata Books, May 2023
“My name is Earth / but people call me Little Earth.” In the fourth installment of their award-winning Madre Tierra / Mother Earth series of trilingual picture books about the natural world, Jorge Argueta and Felipe Ugalde Alcántara collaborate again to introduce Mother Earth, who is “full of all the colors / and all the flavors.” A Junior Library Guild selection, this book about Mother Earth reflects Argueta’s indigenous roots and his appreciation for the natural world. Containing the English and Spanish text on each page, the entire poem appears at the end in Nahuat, the language of Argueta’s Pipil-Nahua ancestors. This is an excellent choice to encourage children to write their own poems about nature and to begin conversations about the interconnected web of life.
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How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon by Joseph D. Reich Sagging Meniscus Press, April 2023
Joseph D. Reich’s 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon contains surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas that run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage. They are hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism. Reich looks at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly “ridiculous” images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich’s teeming inner world.
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A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley Rochester Institute of Technology Press, March 2023
A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: George P. McLean, Birdman of the Senate by Will McLean Greeley recounts Senator George P. McLean’s crowning achievement: overseeing passage of one of the country’s first and most important wildlife conservation laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The MBTA, which is still in effect today, has saved billions of birds from senseless killing and likely prevented the extinction of entire bird species. A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington puts McLean’s victory for birds in the context of his distinguished forty-five-year career marked by many acts of reform during a time of widespread corruption and political instability. Author Will McLean Greeley traces McLean’s rise from obscurity as a Connecticut farm boy to national prominence when he advised five US presidents and helped lead change and shape events as a US senator from 1911 to 1929.
Will McLean Greeley grew up in western Michigan with a passion for American history, politics, and birds. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan and then a master’s degree from Michigan in archives administration. After retiring from a thirty-five-year career in government and corporate market research, he embarked upon a three-year research and writing journey to learn about his great-great-uncle George P. McLean and his legacy.
Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, June 2023
In Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver’s earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future—for a home—in an often unwelcoming place.
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As with any disaster, 1/6: The Graphic Novel is emotionally difficult to read, but nearly impossible to look away from. Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever takes readers into the surreal (for now) world of ‘what if’ the insurrection had been successful. Propaganda messaging drones patrol the streets, news stations are taken by force and resistant newscasters killed on the spot (the Second Amendment ‘trumps’ the First), and Trump supporters rally on the National Mall for the unveiling of an “Independence Day January 6, 2021” statue with state militia (Georgia and Arizona specifically) recognized for their efforts. A MAGA father whose son was killed in the event comes to honor him, only to be distraught by the messaging scapegoating Antifa and BLM. The hero (so far) is a journalist who joins a group of ‘freedom fighters’ working to reinstate democracy, and the cliffhanger ending reveals they’ve got a volatile treasure critical to their success. While the authors note “This is a work of speculative fiction grounded in real events,” it will be all too real a match to what many have feared might have and might still happen in our lifetimes. This will be a four-issue series with free copies available to non-profits and advocacy groups as well as wholesale pricing.
1/6: The Graphic Novel – Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever written by Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan, illustrated by Will Rosado. OneSix Comics, January 2023.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer Shanti Arts, May 2023
In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a collaboration of poetry by Marjorie Maddox and art by her daughter Anna Lee Hafer, inspirited by a rainy-day excursion when Maddox and Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. As never before, they realized how their passions for art and poetry intersect. With this exhibit and Hafer’s own surreal paintings as inspiring backdrop, they exchanged their responses to joy and trauma more deeply—artist to artist, mother to daughter. These connections between poet and visual artist constitute the core of this ekphrastic collection. In addition, Maddox includes nine poems based on work she saw that day by Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley, as well as several later collaborations with Karen Elias.
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Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad by Elías David Illustrations by Claudia Delgadillo Piñata Books, May 2023
Mis días con Papá / Spending Time With Dad follows a boy and his stay-at-home dad, who takes care of him while his mom goes to work at the port, “where huge cargo ships come and go every day.” She oversees the containers that go around the world! In this brightly illustrated bilingual picture book, young children will relate to the family and its daily routines while immigrants will see themselves as they adjust to life far away from relatives. And children will see that the roles of men and women are fluid; dads can be loving fathers in charge of their kids’ well-being and moms can go to the office every day—or vice versa.
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Sivan Piatigorsky-Roth’s Diana: My Graphic Obsession made me realize that Diana holds a fairly firm place in my life experience. Having practically grown up with her, at least in news stories, I was surprised to have so many of Roth’s graphic renditions of famous photographs strike one memory chord after another. Most surprising is to see her life anew, through Roth’s insightful yet somewhat melancholy commentary, like the fact that Diana was only 16 years old when she first met Charles, who was then 29. Roth comments, “He was the very embodiment of charm. Standing next to him, Diana was just a child. His attention was overwhelming.”
2.14.18 by Dan Kaplan Spuyten Duyvil Press, April 2023
Dan Kaplan’s 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of The New York Times, a book that wades through distorted fact, eroded context, and what may (not) be newsworthy. Kaplan is the editor of Burnside Review Press, and 2.4.18 is his third book of poetry.
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Proximal Morocco by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine Ugly Duckling Presse, March 2023
Proximal Morocco is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine originally published in 1975. It was written in fits and starts during a span of ten years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.
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Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor Slapering Hol Press, Aprl 2023
Bone Wishing by Tara Flint Taylor is the 2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner. This contest is open until mid-June to all writers (who are not current students at HVWC) who have not yet published (including self-published) a collection of poems in book or chapbook form.
Taylor’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. She is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint (chapbook cover artist).
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Translated by Jennifer Croft, The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal follows Lucas Pereyra’s day trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, which is fuelled by two motives: to exchange a 15,000 dollar advance for his last book, and to spend some time with a young girl from a literary conference he is trying to bed.
The unpredictability of the Argentinian economy means that if Lucas were to take his advance in Buenos Aires, he would receive less than half of what he would get in Uruguay. Transporting money that way is illegal, though he really is between a rock and a hard place; dealing with Argentinian pesos is like “being paid in ice in the middle of the summer, and freezers are illegal.”
Anxiety abounds here, anxieties which are further fostered by an ambivalence towards his young son, and suspicions about his wife’s adultery. The story is dejected and hopeless, full of self-doubt and hatred. Hints of ambition filter through though, even if these are buried under familial and professional obligations.
An anti-hero in the truest sense, we are still somewhat drawn to Lucas due to his playful, vivid style, his biting social criticism, and most importantly the strength of his writerly ambitions, which unfortunately butt heads with the bleak reality of literary production, As one of his colleagues puts it, “books have to be written… then you decide how much they’re worth… you polish them like diamonds, and then you sell them like a string of sausages.”
Mairal’s protagonist is far from likable, but it would be unjust to make him so. This man, whose obligations towards his family and his career are at odds with his fundamental desire, holding him back from it; how can we expect him to come up smiling?
The Woman From Uruguay by Pedro Mairal; translated by Jennifer Croft. Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2022.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.
No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed Translated from the Arabic by Sherine Elbanhawy Laertes Press, September 2023
These poems in No One is on the Line arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Egyptian poetry Mohsen Mohamed who had been sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest. The writing went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. These poems speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found and forged community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.
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Prayershreds: Poems by Bruce Beasley Orison Books, May 2023
Suppose the shreds of our prayers and of our faiths could themselves become a radical new form of devotion. Bruce Beasley confronts the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our time (political turmoil, societal division and isolation, spiritual despair, environmental catastrophe) and the crisis of faith in the human future. These poems make of the vocabulary of doubt a strange kind of sermon, summoning into chorus Heraclitus, Zeno, the Buddha, Roget’s Thesaurus, ancient prayers and hymns and scriptures, and an AI chatbot. In these fractured and ecstatic psalms, Beasley makes his ruptured way toward a faith that relies not on dogmas and creeds, but on a broken utterance for a torn and living faith.
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Stone Breaker: The Poet James Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England by Kathleen L. Housely Wesleyan University Press, January 2023
Stone Breaker by Kathleen L. Housely is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant, Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820s became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.
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