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Book Review :: The Mistaken Place of Things by Gabriela Aguirre

The Mistaken Place of Things by Gabriela Aguirre book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s English translation of Mexican poet Gabriela Aguirre’s The Mistaken Place of Things invites readers to peer through “the window / through which things happen.” Through the windows of deserts, photographs, bodies, hospitals, dreams, and language, Aguirre navigates the themes of presence and absence — “distance exists / …it’s not just / a word repeated in my writing.” Estrangement, dislocation, and dissociation emerge as Aguirre expresses, “I write it how I feel it.”

Though Aguirre articulates the complexities of being both out of body and out of mind, her writing remains intimate, flowing like a heartfelt letter, blending candor with a dreamlike quality. For Aguirre, distance becomes a lens for perspective and understanding: “The desert I’ve come to know is also that: / a city I’m no longer in.”

As she traverses corporeal, material, and phenomenal landscapes, Aguirre emphasizes the independent existence of people, objects, and places beyond subjective perception. Her focus shifts from mere remembrance — “Something / to extract” — to a process of reliving and rethinking. By recounting experiences with friends, hospital stays, and conversations with her mother, she reframes the nature of reality itself.

“Things are not in their place.” As Aguirre attempts “to piece together this scene,” a palpable discomfort surfaces: a “pain that’s too explicit” prickles the senses, evoking the “pins of loss” as readers grapple to “name the sadness.” Yet, Aguirre understands that naming can lead to avoidance, so she offers just enough to immerse readers in the feelings of loss. Her poetics reflect an aftermath: “about the horror of watching the earth / take the ones you love.”

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s attentive translations allow deep engagement with Gabriela Aguirre’s poems, revealing writing “on the verge” of disclosure. In the haunting conclusion, Aguirre poignantly reflects, “Poetry couldn’t save you, my friend,” leaving us with the resonant question, “What will you take after taking these legs?” This echoes the fleeting temporality of existence.

The Mistaken Place of Things by Gabriela Aguirre, trans. Laura Cesarco Eglin. Eulalia Books, December 2024.

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

Book Review :: Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick

Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Sarah Vogel’s life has been a series of losses as well as lucky breaks. Her birth in Auschwitz coincided with her mother’s death, but women in the concentration camp did what they could to ensure her survival. Time in Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen followed. Then liberation, adoption by the Vogelmann family until, at 15, she is sent to live with someone new. Escape to Berlin came next, along with her first romantic encounter. Then, thanks to the Jewish Immigrant Resettlement Program, she met people whose job it was to help her find her way. At first, emigrating to Israel seemed alluring, but Sarah ultimately opted for the US. First, however, she gave birth to a daughter, conceived during a hasty hook-up with a Russian soldier.

For a time, she and Sasha lived in Queens, NY, where she found work as a custodian at a local college. A series of promotions, as well as an affair with a married professor, offered both heartbreak and opportunity, the upshot of which was a move to Ohio, where Sarah took an administrative job at Kent State. There, she married Walter, and together, they raised a family.

Becoming Sarah tells this fictional story, tracking four generations of Vogel women and covering more than 100 years, from Sarah’s birth in 1942 to the 100th anniversary of the end of the war in 2045. It’s a sweeping look at the Holocaust’s impact on successive generations, even when the actual facts of Sarah’s experience are neither discussed nor disclosed to her offspring or partners. It’s also an in-depth personality profile of an astoundingly passive — and simultaneously fatalistic, fierce, and independent — woman, someone who never hired a private investigator or tried to find Sasha after she vanished. It’s unclear why.

Becoming Sarah is an unusual and deeply moving peek into the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust — leavened with occasional humor — about a flawed but believably-human protagonist and the positive and negative influence she cast on subsequent generations of family members.

Becoming Sarah by Diane Botnick. She Writes Press, October 2025.

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

Book Review :: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Dream Count, Adichie’s first novel since 2014’s Americanah, picks up some of the same themes, especially around romantic relationships and race in America. However, this novel focuses much more on the relationships, as well as the expectations the four women at the core of this novel face. Chiamaka is a freelance travel writer from Nigeria, now living in America, who spends the Covid pandemic looking back on her “dream count,” the number of relationships she has had that haven’t ultimately led to marriage. Zikora, one of her best friends, is a lawyer who has a daughter that the father abandoned. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is the most financially successful of them all, as she has become wealthy through questionable, but supposedly common, banking practices in Nigeria.

One of the main plotlines, though, centers around Kadiatou, a character Adichie modeled on Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who accused a powerful hotel guest of sexual assault. Through that part of the novel, Adichie explores the ways culture, including other women, discount women’s stories of assault and rape. Adichie uses fiction to explore what one woman might feel in that situation, especially in unexpected ways.

Adichie’s novel draws heavily on cultural events of the past decade or so, such as the pandemic or Diallo’s assault, but, at times, that focus limits the novel. Adichie has been vocal about the rush to judgment that can happen on social media, the condemnation that comes before a trial that can ruin people’s lives and careers. Omelogor gives voice to such ideas in the novel, as she attends graduate school in the U.S. for a brief time, and her comments sound both defensive and antagonistic without the nuance of an equally strong voice to balance her ideas.

As in Adichie’s previous work, though, the focus is on the relationships and the way friends and family continue to pressure these women to follow a traditionally feminine path of marriage and motherhood. They are all successful in their own way, but those around them often question that success and the cost of it, even leading to the women doubting themselves, but Adichie provides them with full, rich lives, showing that there are a number of ways women can live in the world.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Alfred A. Knopf, March 2025.

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

Book Review :: Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

Review by Jami Macarty

Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza book cover image

In Songs for the Land-Bound, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza sings of “memory, art, turbulence” in a woman’s relationship to motherhood, marriage, aging, writing, spirituality, and “wilderness.” Garcia-Mendoza’s assured and refined debut, divided into six bird-ornamented sections, documents the “complications” of her subjects by employing contrasting modes of discourse that illustrate the “fights between” and “the opposite effect” of dichotomous thinking, creating a dynamic interplay between coupling and countering within the choices of poetic form, linear organization, and noun constructions.

Garcia-Mendoza juxtaposes various forms: a nocturne counters an aubade, odes oppose an epithalamium, the prose of a haibun contrasts with the verse of a sonnet, the erasure found in a collage compares to the patchwork technique of a cento, and still lifes stand in contrast to “dioramas.” Within these forms, lines are often stanzaically organized in couplets or tercets, reinforcing the interplay of coupling and countering. This duality is also expressed in word pairings such as “the conditional, the subjunctive”; “relentlessness or restlessness”; and “bless & burn,” as well as through the progressions of three nouns: “starlings, selfies, sinkholes”; “soldier, poet, or king”; “color, time, light.” Gentle enjambment highlights the poet’s fine attention to the potential meanings that arise from additive and oppositional units of meaning.

Garcia-Mendoza’s narrative-lyric poems cycle “if, when, where” while considering “the carrion, the carry on, the carrying” that defines the life of a middle-aged woman. As the poet considers a “sense of life debt,” she acknowledges the “dread and marvel” of language, wilderness, and familylife, each seen as a “romance / with the unreliable,” “bearing / darkness.”

To counter the notion of “solastalgia,” the poet denies nothing but makes deliberate choices. She asserts: “My moral code is making”; “Revision means survival.” Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound are “illuminant over the scar.” Her poems of “wreckage strung with violets” — “music, all of it.”

Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza. June Road Press, September 2024.

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

Book Review :: Walking the Burn by Rachel Kellum

Walking the Burn by Rachel Kellum book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Walking the Burn, Rachel Kellum thoughtfully intertwines literal and metaphorical language to explore the devastation wrought by fire, both in nature and within personal lives. The “burn” symbolizes not only the physical destruction marked by “a ring of char” and the “black skeletons / of juniper,” but also deeper emotional scars, including betrayals, injuries, and societal issues connected to Mormon patriarchy, sibling death, relationship failures, mental illness, and racial injustice. Kellum’s central question: “How did we get here?”

The collection is structured into three sections — Arise, Abide, and Dissolve — mirroring the process of mindfulness and inviting readers to engage in introspective reflection. The narrative unfolds from Kellum’s childhood, addressing themes of familial trauma and the complexities of relationships with her father, intimate partners, and sons, before transitioning to a focus on aging, grief, healing, and forgiveness.

Kellum’s autobiographical poems resonate with authenticity as she candidly navigates the stark contrasts between societal expectations and personal realities. Her vulnerability reveals the tensions that persist not just in her life but within broader social landscapes. Notably poignant are the series of poems that hold vigil for murdered Black men, including Philando Castille, Terrance Crutcher, and George Floyd. Kellum invokes their names while being conscious of her place in their narratives. While she tries “Not to make this story” hers, her experience in an interracial relationship informs the outrage, grief, and anxiety apparent in these poems.

In one moment, Kellum reflects on the difficulty of “saying less,” recognizing the weight of her words. Each poem radiates a “clear promise,” attesting to her roles as a daughter, sister, lover, and mother, all while serving a greater purpose for family and society. Ultimately, in Walking the Burn, Kellum invites us to walk alongside her through both the beauty and devastation of life’s experiences.

Walking the Burn by Rachel Kellum. Middle Creek Publishing, March 2025.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: Borderlines: An Astral Experience in Poems

Borderlines: An Astral Experience in Poems by Alan Botsford book cover image

Borderlines: An Astral Experience in Poems by Alan Botsford
Cyberwit.com, April 2025

“A wonderful gang of talkative alter egos meets the ego in a cosmic expatriate bar and the ego tells their story, which is the intriguing inner and outer story of the poet Alan Botsford himself.” — Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea: 48 Poems in 6 Waves

“In these poems of self and world, an American abroad, living in Japan, with a copy of Walt Whitman under his arm, sets out on the open road of the imagination, absorbing and transcending cultural constructions of that very self and world, ventriloquizing voices that speak back frequently at and to the author, as they embody multitudes, exemplifying the interconnectedness and contingency of identity, language, place, and emotion. Borderlines offers a new vision, looking both ways, inward and outward, ahead and behind, crossing borders, in an embrace centered ultimately in love.” — Michael Sowder, author of Sacred Letters: Sanskrit, Yoga, and Awakening the Divine

Alan Botsford is an American poet, author, and professor born in Connecticut and living in Japan for many years, where he teaches in university. His poetry collections include Possessions: Poems in American Poetry and Dreamer: Poems in Culture, and the hybrid Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore.

Sponsored :: New Book :: Feller

Feller: Poems by Denton Loving book cover image

Feller: Poems by Denton Loving
Mercer University Press, August 2025

Using the natural world as both mirror and lens, the poems in Denton Loving’s third collection of poetry explore themes of connection, longing, and the pursuit of a fully lived life. They celebrate “the light that enters the woods and cleanses the wound.” They seek the sacred order in everything, from the phases of the moon down to the delicate colors of a moth’s wings. And yet, they are not cloistered away from the human struggle — whether with nature, with each other, or with the self. Feller envisions our environment and landscape, not as backdrop or ornament but as revelatory forces illuminating the hidden chambers of the self. At once deeply rooted in his Appalachian soil and universally resonant, Feller confirms Loving’s position among those rare poets who transmute a sense of place into profound human truth.

“Loving makes lyric sense of complex issues in poem after poem in Feller, with his special blend of eco-poetics and earthly reason.” — Elaine Sexton, Site Specific

“At once timely and timeless, Feller is a superbly striking and essential book.” — Matt W. Miller, Tender the River

“Reading Feller is a transformative, joyful, loneliness-alleviating experience.” — Annie Woodford, Where You Come From Is Gone

Book Review :: Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Run for the Hills, continues to develop themes from his most recent works, especially the idea of family and what that looks like in the twenty-first century. The main character Mad — short for Madeline — lives on a successful farm in rural Tennessee with her mother, as her father left them when she was young, and she’s never heard from him again. A man just over a decade older shows up at their roadside stand claiming to be her half-brother, as his father left him and his mother, then started a new life in Tennessee.

This development leads to a road trip, as Rube — short for Reuben, as their father loved nicknames — has had a private investigator discover that their father has two more children and is now living yet another life in California. They drive across the country picking up Pep, short for Pepper, and Tom, short (sort of) for Theron, on their way to California.

They all share the same experience, that of their father leaving, but their father reinvented himself with each new family, moving from being a detective novelist to an organic farmer to a basketball coach to a camera man/filmmaker. Thus, while each child shares the same experience of abandonment, they each have a different view of their father.

Along the way, they bond with one another through their childhood trauma, but also their love for this man who was a good father to each of them until he left and never contacted them again. They each discover what it’s like to have siblings to rely on, to tease, and even to fight with. They know they’re going to have to go home again, no matter what they find at the end of the trip, but this newfound family may help them make peace with the lives they currently live.

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson. Ecco, May 2025.

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

Book Review :: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

There’s not much of a plot to relate from Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, as the unnamed narrator doesn’t do much. She’s teaching at a school for underprivileged boys, but she’s not invested in their learning, though she likes her students quite a bit. She has a relationship with Sasha, but he’s clearly more in love with her than she is with him. She begins a different relationship with an unhoused man she refers to as Trenchcoat — he picked up a trench coat she left outside of her apartment — as they buy high-end purses that they can then pass on to one of his friends who will sell them at a nice profit.

The plot, though, really isn’t the point of the novel. Instead, it’s more of a character study of a Palestinian woman who is stuck in her life, partly due to the trauma of never feeling like one belongs anywhere and partly due to the death of her parents when she was young. Their death led to her inheriting a great deal of money, so her life is superficially stable, though she goes through her monthly distribution quite quickly, largely due to her obsessive focus on cleanliness. She spends hours scrubbing away what she believes is dead skin, even seeing snakes that come out of her. She clearly sees herself as dirty, and she doesn’t believe anything she can do will ever help her be truly clean. The coin of the title is a reference to a coin she believes she swallowed when she was a child, but it also seems to refer to the part of her back that she cannot reach to clean, thus serving as a metaphor for her displacement, trauma, and survivor’s guilt.

Near the end of the novel she goes in the opposite direction, seemingly trying to recreate Palestine in her New York apartment, after a theft at the school reveals how little she understands her students. The narrator addresses a “you” throughout the novel, becoming more pronounced near the conclusion of the book, though it’s never quite clear whom it might be. There are hints that it could be a person at the beginning of a new relationship, but it also feels like it could be a manifestation of her lack of belonging. If so, she might be on the track to understanding herself a bit better, though the ending is vague, at best. Regardless, Zaher has clearly conveyed a character who is struggling to understand how to live in a world that doesn’t seem to want her and her people to exist at all.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher. Catapult, July 2024.

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

Book Review :: Confessions by Catherine Airey

Confessions by Catherine Airey book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Confessions, Catherine Airey’s debut novel, follows three generations of Irish women, moving from the 1970s to the 2020s, showing how each of them deal with discovering who they are, partly through love and relationships, but partly through art and culture, as well. The novel begins with Cora in New York City in 2001 as she was already struggling with stability, given the death of her mother. The death of her father begins to push her over the edge until a letter from her Aunt Róisín gives her a chance at a new life in rural Ireland.

In the 1970s, Róisín and her sister Máire watch as a group called The Screamers move into a house in their neighborhood, ultimately hiring Máire as an artist to catalog their life. Michael, the boy who lives next door, but who doesn’t fit in for his own reasons, loves Máire, but watches her ultimately move to New York to pursue her artistic desires, while Róisín stays home alone.

In 2018, Cora’s daughter Lyca lives in rural Ireland with her mother and Great Aunt Ró. Cora is one of the main activists working for legalization of abortion in Ireland, while Lyca looks through the old house as a means to understand herself and her family.

Given the title, the main irony of the novel is that the characters don’t often confess the truth to one another, as most of the revelations that come in the novel do so because a separate character finds out information about one of the others. Given the different points of view, readers often hear about one character from another, not from themselves. Thus, they all have to decide what they should reveal and what they should hide, usually out of a desire to protect.

Overall, Airey’s novel shows the struggles women have faced and continue to face — whether that’s abusive men, a culture that outlaws choice, or isolation that comes from their not following the dominant narrative —but also how they can support one another to build real community, at times.

Confessions by Catherine Airey. Mariner Books, January 2025.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: Fragments of Cerulean

Fragments of Cerulean by Neal H. Paris book cover image

Fragments of Cerulean, Short Stoires by Neal H. Paris
Revelation House Works, May 2025

Fragments of Cerulean is a surreal and emotionally resonant collection of short stories that blurs the boundaries between horror, memory, and myth. Structured in five evocative phases, this book invites readers into a world where the familiar becomes uncanny and the subconscious takes center stage. Each story is a journey through eerie landscapes — abandoned highways, sentient motel rooms, and cryptic machines that trade in secrets — crafted with immersive, cinematic prose.

This collection explores the fragile nature of identity and the haunting echoes of loss, transformation, and fear. With a tone that shifts between dreamlike introspection and psychological unease, the stories challenge perceptions of reality and self. Readers will encounter narratives that tug at the heart while unsettling the mind, offering a reading experience that is both emotionally raw and intellectually provocative.

Ideal for fans of atmospheric, genre-defying fiction, Fragments of Cerulean delivers a powerful blend of dark beauty and symbolic depth. It doesn’t offer easy resolutions — instead, it invites introspection and lingers long after the final page. Perfect for those drawn to the liminal, the strange, and the deeply human, this collection is a haunting exploration of what lies beneath the surface of our stories — and ourselves.

Book Review :: Spent by Alison Bechdel

Spent by Alison Bechdel book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Spent, Alison Bechdel’s latest work, is subtitled “A Comic Novel,” setting it apart from her first three graphic memoirs. That said, while this work is fiction, it still draws heavily on Bechdel’s life, mainly in themes more than in events, including a main character clearly modeled on Bechdel herself. In this reality, though, she’s a pygmy goat farmer in addition to being a graphic artist and writer. As in real life, she has had a work become so successful that it’s been turned into a television show, much as Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home became a Broadway show. However, the difference here is that Bechdel has lost control of that intellectual property, so it has steadily moved away from her original vision.

One of the main themes that Bechdel explores through that change is fame and all that goes with it, especially the idea of selling out. The Bechdel of this novel has achieved a level of success, but she wonders if it’s worth it, especially when her next book offer comes from Megalopub, which is not only a large corporation, but one owned by a right-wing-supporting owner, one who goes against everything Bechdel supports. Similarly, Bechdel’s partner Holly creates online content which pushes her into a higher level of notoriety. At first, that change seems positive, as she begins to receive free equipment for their farm, but she begins to obsess over statistics and views, spending more time on metrics than on enjoying their life.

There are also subplots of relationships among their friends, which should remind readers of the community in Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, but the main focus, as the title implies, is on what and how one spends, whether that’s money or time or energy. The fictional Bechdel feels overwhelmed by the trajectory of the world, but she ends by finding a glimmer of hope in the community that might help replenish her and those around her. That’s an approach most of us could use these days.

Spent by Alison Bechdel. Mariner Books, May 2025.

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

Book Review :: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

While public dissent was unthinkable in Stalin’s Soviet Union, some citizens, inspired by civil rights movements of the 1960s and Khrushchev’s “thaw,” decided to fight for a change after his death. Historian and Professor Benjamin Nathans chronicles the roughly twenty-year history of this intelligentsia movement in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause — titled after a common dissident toast. Relying on declassified Soviet archives and retained underground dissident literature, he relates a compelling tale of resistance in the face of state persecution.

Nathans carefully corrects dissident stereotypes from Cold War rhetoric. Though Western darlings like Sakharov and Solzenitzyn play their roles, most protagonists are not motivated by Western democratic ideals, but by promises of socialist reform in keeping with the 1936 “Stalin Constitution” and its latent — ultimately empty — guarantee of rights. They lacked the public attention of right movements in the democratic world, but the playbook for highlighting state hypocrisy was similar. Unfortunately, with no real mechanism to enact these types of reform, the state simply attacked its critics as anti-Soviet and the KGB decisively crushed the movement in the early 1980s.

While some readers might be intimidated by its 816 pages, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction serves as an added testament to the book’s quality. In this political moment, when so much feels out of control in America and the world, these stories of quixotic, principled dissents may be just what we need to weather it.

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. Princeton University Press, August 2024.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: The Cobbler’s Crusaders

The Cobbler's Crusaders by Rick Steigelman book cover image

The Cobbler’s Crusaders by Rick Steigelman
Author Published, May 2025

Jacquelyn Pajot, a nine-year-old American visiting her sanctimonious grandmother in Paris, falls in with a pair of young French girls whose carefree grasp of ‘right and wrong’ has the wide-eyed American narrowly averting prison, purgatory and, most perilously, her grandmother’s righteous indignation.

“A charmingly whimsical, whip-smart slice of Parisian life wrapped in equal parts heart and humor…Rick Steigelman’s prose is wry, warm, and beautifully descriptive, capturing the magic of Montmartre through the curious, wide eyes of young Jacquelyn Pajot.” — Alex Norton, Likely Story

“Dialogue sparkles with life, especially as Jacquelyn navigates the humorous pitfalls of being an American tween in a French-speaking world.” — Swapna Peri, Book Reviews Cafe

“Beneath all the comedic mishaps, there’s a beautiful sense of intergenerational connection. The dynamic between Jacquelyn and her grandmother, Catherine, is particularly touching as it anchors the story in emotional truth while allowing the young cast to explore their own emerging identities and moral boundaries. I’d easily recommend it to readers who enjoy novels like A Man Called Ove or The Elegance of the Hedgehog, stories that offer laughter, but also invite you to pause and feel something deeper.” — Heena Pardeshi, The Reading Bud

Editor’s Choice :: Arcana: The Lost Heirs

Arcana: The Lost Heirs by Author/Illustrator Sam Prentice-Jones book cover image

Arcana: The Lost Heirs by Author/Illustrator Sam Prentice-Jones
Feiwel & Friends, June 2024

Debut author/illustrator Sam Prentice-Jones explores fighting against destiny and reconciling the actions of ancestors in Arcana: The Lost Heirs, a tarot-inspired fantasy YA graphic novel.

James, Daphne, Koko, and Sonny have all grown up surrounded by magic in the Arcana, an organization of witches that protects the magical world, run by the mysterious and secretive Majors. Eli Jones, however, hadn’t even known other witches existed, until he stumbled into James. As James introduces him to the world of the Arcana, Eli finds the family he never had and a blossoming romance with James.

The five new friends soon realize that sinister influences are afoot, and everything may not be what it seems at the Arcana. When the group delves deeper into the mystery surrounding the deaths of their parents and the Majors’ rise to power, they discover that they’re at the center of a curse — one they’ve just unwittingly set into motion. As the friends search for answers, they’ll have to confront the cursed legacy that links them in hopes of freeing their futures.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution by Mary Anne Trasciatti

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution by Mary Anne Trasciatti book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Mary Anne Trasciatti’s biography of intrepid civil liberties and labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn [1890—1964] is as much an account of Gurley Flynn’s nearly 60-years as an organizer, speaker, tactician, and fundraiser, as it is an account of government crackdowns on dissent during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The heavily detailed and exhaustively researched volume digs into Flynn’s earliest work with the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW), where she developed a reputation as a fearless, outspoken firebrand. Dubbed The Rebel Girl, her work in support of exploited laborers took her from her home in the Bronx to cities across the country where she mounted a soapbox and exhorted crowds to support striking workers in Paterson, New Jersey, Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington.

Her humor and ease with people won her approval from everyday folks – and attention from rightwing politicians and police who tried to silence her. But she would not be cowed. Instead, her defense of labor rights and free speech led her to the then-fledgling American Civil Liberties Union and Communist Party. Although she was booted out of the ACLU during the height of the Red Scare, her commitment to working people never faltered.

Nonetheless, there were setbacks. In 1955, for example, Flynn was jailed for violating the Smith Act, legislation that made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the US government. She used her time in prison to read, write, and agitate from afar. Once released, she fought against repressive legislation that sought to revoke US citizenship from those convicted of rebellion, insurrection, seditious conspiracy, or Smith Act violations.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn lived a life of resolute political engagement. At the same time, Trasciatti makes Flynn fully human, detailing several failed relationships and the heartbreaking loss of her only son to cancer. The end result is a richly drawn portrait of a bold, principled, and savvy woman who deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution by Mary Anne Trasciatti. Rutgers University Press, June 2025.

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

Now Out from #Ranger Press: Noetic Variations, v1 and v2

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Noetic Variations, v1 and v2 are experiments in extreme poetic abstraction, eschewing the appearance of formal narrative and mainstream convention. The NV project is an exciting postmodern exercise in pure language, stripped of all meaning and impervious to literary interpretation. Download free copies here: V1 V2 or purchase here: V1 V2. View flyer for more information.

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Book Review :: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sanam Mahloudji’s debut novel follows three generations of Iranian women: Elizabeth, the grandmother; Seema and Shirin, her daughters; Bita and Niaz, Seema and Shirin’s daughters, respectively. Because of the Iranian revolution, the family becomes split, with Seema, Shirin, and Bita moving to the United States, leaving Elizabeth and Niaz in Iran. They were an important, wealthy family in Iran, mainly due to their tracing their lineage back to an ancestor they refer to as the Great Warrior.

One of the main themes of the novel, though, is the false narratives the family has been telling themselves. They have spent so much time looking to the past, as well as hiding the truth about various parts of their past, that they haven’t developed healthy relationships in the present. Thus, much of the novel is an unraveling of the stories they’ve told themselves, which have prevented them from seeing each other (and their family, in general) as they really are.

The larger conflict in the novel that brings everybody together and into tension is a legal case involving Shirin. She’s the most over-the-top character, flaunting the family’s wealth and believing Persians in the U.S. should still care about their family. An undercover police officer propositions her, believing her to be a prostitute, and she jokingly plays along with him before throwing a drink on him. Bita, who is in law school at the time, tries to help her aunt. Elizabeth and Niaz travel to the U.S. near the end of the novel as the trial approaches, leading to a number of revelations about the family.

The more important conflicts are the interpersonal ones, as each character has to figure out who they want to be and how they want to live the rest of their lives. Elizabeth reflects on her marriage and the man she once loved, but whom she set aside. Shirin has to come to grips with how others perceive her and how she presents herself. Bita and Niaz have the most to decide, as they are young women in very different situations. Bita is in law school because she thinks she needs to live up to some ideal that her mother couldn’t, while Niaz lives under the oppressive Iranian regime, trying to rebel where she can. Ultimately, the novel is about women trying to figure out how to live in relationship with one another, learning how to be mothers and daughters.

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji. Scribner, March 2025.

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

Book Review :: Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon

Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

During the Spanish Inquisition (1492 and 1834), the Catholic Church targeted Jews, Muslims, female herbalists and healers, and, later, Protestants for expulsion from Spain and Portugal. The goal, writes author Barbara Stark-Nemon in her introduction to Isabela’s Way, was the consolidation of power by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

By all accounts, the Inquisition was brutal, and Stark-Nemon writes that following an expulsion edict issued by Spain in 1492, many Spanish Jews emigrated to Portugal, where for approximately 100 years, “New Christians” — Jewish converts to Catholicism, sometimes called Conversos or Marranos — evaded the Inquisitors. But peace was always tentative.

For 14-year-old Isabela de Castro Nunez, the life she’d known as a Converso ended when, in 1605, the Bubonic Plague hit the small town of Abrantes, Portugal, where she’d grown up. This was because the Church blamed New Christians for the spread of the deadly disease.

It’s a tense setup. Compounding this, Isabela is grappling with her mother’s death and her father’s prolonged absence to promote his business and political interests, leaving her feeling both abandoned and alone. Add in the looming political repression directed at her community, and it is not surprising that Isabela, her friend David, and his sisters listen when advised to flee their homeland for the presumed safety of France.

Stark-Nemon’s recreation of their fictional journey — sometimes traveling together and sometimes traveling separately — is filled with intrigue, violence, love, and the kindness of strangers. Moreover, a beautifully imagined network of clandestine safe houses comes to life, and we see Isabela, already renowned for her intricate embroidery, mature as she embarks on this harrowing journey.

Isabela’s Way is a tale of resilience in which good overcomes evil. All told, the novel is a vivid depiction of resistance and a powerful indictment of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and scapegoating. It’s a damn good story.

Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon. She Writes Press, September 2025.

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

Book Review :: With My People: Life, Justice, and Activism Beyond the University by Jonathan Pulphus

With My People: Life, Justice, and Activism Beyond the University by Jonathan Pulphus book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Jonathan Pulphus was a sophomore at St. Louis University (SLU), a private, Jesuit college, 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. It was 2014 and Brown’s death led to months of protests against systemic racism and abuse by law enforcement.

Pulphus was galvanized by the movement and, like other Black students at and beyond SLU, he became immersed in fighting racial discrimination both on campus and off. His own campus was active and alongside a group of peers, he began demanding more diverse course offerings and the recruitment of more faculty and students of color at SLU. The resultant 13-point Clock Tower Accords eventually included a commitment by school administrators to increase funding for African American Studies. The university also promised to increase financial aid for Black undergraduates, establish a Diversity Speaker series, and work on building better relationships with the local community. It was a significant victory — one that Pulphus is proud to have been part of.

With My People, his reflection on the Accords and his role as a campus leader-turned-community-organizer, is as much a history of this historical moment as it is an instruction guide for campus organizers. Filled with concrete lessons and wise commentary, the text lays out tactical mistakes made by the SLU students (and the groups they created, including the still-active Tribe X) and offers clear advice about how best to balance academic progress and activism. Moreover, his message to students who are new to progressive movements covers numerous topics, from how to stay on track to graduate to how to negotiate with administrators and forge intergenerational alliances. Throughout, the tone is practical and strategic.

With My People blends inspiration with political savvy. It’s an important how-to guide for student activists and fledgling organizers. What’s more, its straightforward prose makes it a valuable addition to books about social change, social justice, and sustained antiracist efforts.

With My People: Life, Justice, and Activism Beyond the University by Jonathan Pulphus. Broadleaf Books, September 2025.

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

Book Review :: Universality by Natasha Brown

Universality by Natasha Brown book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Natasha Brown’s second novel, Universality, begins with a news story detailing a party at a farm during Covid that goes terribly wrong. The police raid the celebration because it’s violating restrictions put in place because of the pandemic, though they don’t notice that a young man has bludgeoned somebody with a solid gold bar, then run away with it. The writer of the story traces the important people to see their involvement and their motivations. The rest of the novel follows several of those characters — Hannah, the reporter; Richard, the owner of the farm and the gold; and Lenny, the mother of the young man and a writer who specializes in shocking readers with right-wing ideology — from their points of view.

Given the multiple points of view, it quickly becomes clear that each character has a quite different view of the events of that day, as well as their lives and themselves. They each present themselves in a much better light, not surprisingly, but they also present different facts and motivations. By beginning with a news story, a seemingly objective account, Brown upends the readers’ expectations of objectivity, especially in terms of narrative. It’s not only that the characters tell the readers different stories, they’re telling themselves different stories about their lives and the world itself.

Given Brown’s historical context — she references the 2008 financial crisis, as Richard is in that industry, as well as Covid — she’s also exploring the larger narratives countries and cultures tell. The connection of that background with the personal stories ties into her title, as each character seems motivated not only by justifying their view of the world, which serves only to further separate people, moving them away from unity, but also by greed. That desire manifests itself differently for each character — with Richard, it’s more obvious, but Hannah wants to move up in social class, while Lenny has a disdain for everybody, it seems, so she seeks power above all else — but that seems to be the universal trait they share. Brown encourages readers to question her characters’ narratives, but also their own, as they tell themselves — we tell ourselves — that we’re different.

Universality by Natasha Brown. Random House, 2025.

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

Book Review :: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Dream Hotel, Sara Hussein is living in a near-future version of the United States that seems both entirely predictable and terrifying. The novel opens as authorities detain Sara, a Moroccan-American, at the airport because her risk score has risen too high. The company that produces the risk scores draws on a wealth of information to determine people’s potential risk, including their dreams, thanks to Dreamsaver Inc.’s implant that helps people have enough rest to function the next day, even on only a few hours’ sleep. Of course, the user agreement that people sign enables DI to sell their data to companies, such as the one producing the risk scores. The algorithm behind the risk scores is intellectual property, so Sara and her lawyer are unable to use it in trying to free her from the retention center the government sends her to because of the interaction at the airport.

While much of the novel centers around this dystopic premise, Lalami goes beyond exploring the ways tech corporations have monetized users’ data, as she explores issues of race and gender, as well. Though the other female residents’ races aren’t clear in most of the descriptions, the ones that are usually match the races that dominate the U.S.’s current prison system. Similarly, Sara realizes that the observation at the retention center is little more than an amplification of the observations women encounter every day of their lives.

There are also wildfires raging, as the retention center is in California, though it is far from the only place in the U.S. experiencing the severe effects of climate change. In one scene, the residents (nobody refers to them as prisoners, though they are not free to leave) joke about having their release hearings rescheduled due to another wildfire or hurricane or earthquake. Any of those seems as likely as the other.

What holds the entire novel together is Lalami’s critique of the role of money in each of these areas. The companies that run the retention centers use those who are there for cheap labor through their contracts with various outside companies. The technology companies benefit from the data they gather through the wide array of devices each character used when they were free, but they also collect data on the residents, even sending one of their employees in under cover to perform an experiment around product placement in dreams. In fact, Sara ultimately realizes that it’s in corporations’ best interests to keep extending their stay, fabricating infractions to prevent their release, which helps her begin to rebel against such systems. She also realizes that she needs help to fight back against corporations with much more power and money than she has, a message that becomes more and more relevant every day.

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. Pantheon Books, March 2025.

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

Book Review :: DisElderly Conduct: The Flawed Business of Assisted Living and Hospice by Judy Karofsky

DisElderly Conduct: The Flawed Business of Assisted Living and Hospice by Judy Karofsky book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Lillian Deutsch was 87, she was hospitalized with pneumonia. Although she’d previously been active — she’d been a corporate executive, done stand-up comedy, and led numerous organizations in her Florida community — the respiratory illness led to other maladies, and she ultimately agreed to move to Wisconsin to be closer to her daughter, Judy Karofsky.

For the next seven years, Deutsch was relatively independent. Then, in 2013, she began having frequent ischemic attacks (mini strokes). That same year, a massive stroke impaired her mobility and speech. This was followed by a broken hip.

Independent living quickly segued into assisted living, and DisElderly Conduct traces Deutsch’s experiences at six different facilities over the next five years. She was sexually assaulted in one, and was handled so roughly in another that her arm was badly bruised. At still another, she was left on the floor for hours following a middle-of-the-night fall. In addition, her dietary preferences were ignored, and both she and Karofsky were deemed pests for asserting themselves.

Karofsky blames several factors for this mistreatment. Unlike skilled nursing facilities, neither assisted living nor memory care units — 70 percent of them owned by for-profit entities – are federally regulated and most receive minimal state oversight. Despite high monthly fees ($5000 to $20,000), Karofsky writes that shoddy care, often from barely-trained and badly-paid Certified Nursing Assistants, is common.

Then there’s hospice, which, like assisted living, is also run for profit. Gone are the days of palliative care volunteers helping the dying cross over. Instead, unregulated and unscrupulous providers have cashed in and Karofsky charges that “fraud and exploitation” are endemic.

DisElderly Conduct provides a disturbing and enraging glimpse into these elder-care industries. And while the book offers only bare-bones policy recommendations for federal and state monitoring, it is nonetheless essential reading for aging adults and their loved ones. Indeed, it’s a clear and impassioned call to action.

DisElderly Conduct: The Flawed Business of Assisted Living and Hospice by Judy Karofsky. New Village Press, May 2025.

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

Book Review :: Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson

Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ginseng Roots, Craig Thompson’s latest work, has come out in the midst of a bit of controversy. Some readers have criticized Thompson for telling a story they don’t believe was his to tell. Part of that stems from ginseng’s history with and connection to China, but much of it also comes from Thompson’s telling the story of Chua, a Hmong boy he met when he worked in ginseng fields, whom he interviews as an adult. In both cases, though, Thompson relies on others to tell those stories, using experts, many of whom are Chinese, to talk about ginseng’s history and importance. He also allows Chua to tell his story himself, as Thompson is merely the interviewer in that part of the book.

In fact, this book feels like at least two, if not three, rather separate books put together. One part is devoted to the history of ginseng in Wisconsin, where Thompson grew up, and the world (he travels to Korea, as well as China, for example). Not only does Thompson allow others to provide that background, those sections of the book have a tendency to feel like more of an information dump than anything else. The book hits its stride when Thompson explores his childhood, as well as his current relationship with his family. That part connects to Thompson’s struggles as an artist, though not as completely as it could.

Thompson is best known for Blankets — which received a number of awards — a memoir exploring his departure from the conservative Christianity of his childhood. Since then, though, his work hasn’t received the same response, either critically or in terms of sales. Thus, he questions his vocation, an artistic crisis that’s exacerbated by a pain in his drawing hand that nobody seems to be able to help heal. As with his interactions with his family, those struggles help push the book into more interesting territory. Similarly, when he brings in class and race in talking about his childhood, the book becomes more interesting.

I’m glad that Thompson worked through the paralysis he felt stuck in as he came to write this book; I just wish he would have written more about his roots as a person and an artist and less about the historical background of ginseng.

Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson. Pantheon, April 2025.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: If I Had Said Beauty

If I Had Said Beauty by Tami Haaland book cover image

If I had Said Beauty, Poetry by Tami Haaland
Lost Horse Press, March 2025

If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland’s fourth collection of poetry, is dedicated to known and unknown ancestors. It explores the possible narratives and distant origins of what lies behind a sense of self — including recent and ancient DNA, recessive and dominant traits, mitochondrial underpinnings, and an intricate microbiome. Luminous and spare, the poems seek to unravel and speculate, document and lament what happens in a life and what might have been. While probing for definition in the mysteries of deep time, the poems are nevertheless grounded in encounters with wild and domestic life, intimate moments of loss and family connection, all of which intertwine to expand the meaning of “autobiography.” According to poet Connie Voisine, “In these poems, all the spirits are welcome members of [Haaland’s] community, an atom, a spruce, a fly, and the ghosts of her ancestors who are suddenly near, and alive. These poems show me how to remain open to the influx of beings, and how we might allow their various beauties to aid in our survival.”

Book Review :: The Girl in the Walls by Meg Eden Kuyatt

The Girl in the Walls by Meg Eden Kuyatt book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

Meg Eden Kuyatt is a master of the novel in verse form. Her writing in The Girl in the Walls is elegant, but not finicky; dramatic, but not maudlin. You could teach a workshop on her use of titles alone. Like her protagonist V, Kuyatt is a real artist. She has created a true voice for V, an autistic girl on the cusp of high school, learning her way around her strong feelings and out in the wonderland of the world. V introduces herself in vibrant socks that say, “I am strange and wonderful.” And with that, we are off.

After a rough year, V has been sent to Grandma Jojo’s for the summer. Jojo lives in a clean white house that has been in the family for generations, with plenty of secrets and sludge hidden within the walls. There are supernatural elements here but also some history, stories of how people who act differently have been treated over the years. These are complicated characters. What shines through, though, is empathy. When V has a breakthrough in her perspective of Jojo and the ghost girl, readers are brought to a satisfying resolution.

Of course, as a book of poems, there are metaphors. The pristine parlor displays a collection of perfect porcelain dolls, while Jojo’s granddaughters struggle with masking who they are in social situations. V’s cousin, Cat, creates assemblages, a kind of collage sculpture she describes as taking discarded, broken stuff and turning it into something beautiful.

There are many levels to this book, making it perfect for the target age audience (juvenile fiction, grades 3-7), teachers, and families with neurodivergence. Highly recommend.

The Girl in the Walls by Meg Eden Kuyatt. Scholastic Press, May 2025.

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

Book Review :: Hesitation Waltz by Amie Whittemore

Hesitation Waltz by Amie Whittemore book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Hesitation Waltz, the 2023 selection in the Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series, Amie Whittemore crafts multimorphic poems that reflect our “ruined and beautiful” world. Through a blend of pastorals, odes, elegies, and epistles, which take form alongside meditations, lullabies, and personae poems, she gives voice to the “vulnerable … narratives” of life; its “riches” and “promise,” “precarity” and “shadow.”

To explore what “is miraculous” and interrogate “Who’s complicit,” Whittemore speaks from “mouths [that] cannot be tamed / and thankfully so.” The various poetic forms mirror her contortionist-like struggle to articulate essential truths and forge connections with her audience, establishing a powerful bond between the poem, the speaker, and the listener.

A hallmark of Whittemore’s poems is their distinct address. Whether the poet is speaking to a student in a science fiction course who complained on an evaluation about being “uncomfortable” with “women befriending / robot spiders,” to a goldfinch adapting to “human activity, / deforestation,” to “a woman who likes dishing about nuns,” to “the half-male, half-female cardinal,” or to her one-year-old nephew, she skillfully balances narrative directness with lyric tenderness.

The chapbook’s title references “The Hesitation Waltz,” a 1950 oil painting by Surrealist René Magritte. This reference suggests the surreal struggles inherent in finding a romantic connection with a hesitant lesbian and comprehending our dependence on fossil fuels. In Hesitation Waltz, Amie Whittemore advocates for “strange thinking” as we seek solutions to the “world’s problems” and celebrates our “myriad existence” in an uncertain yet hopeful dance.

Hesitation Waltz by Amie Whittemore. Midwest Writing Center Press, March 2025.

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

Book Review :: Twist by Colum McCann

Twist by Colum McCann book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Anthony Fennell, the narrator of Twist, should remind the reader of Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. He’s lost his way in life, unable to write a new novel or play, even unwilling to admit the existence of the son he’s become estranged from since he and his wife went separate ways. He receives an opportunity to write a story about people who work on breaks in underwater cables — which actually carry most of the data from one country to another, a fact most people don’t know — which leads him to meet John Conway.

Like Carraway’s Gatsby, Conway is a mysterious figure who seems to have made himself into somebody else, perhaps for the love of a woman who seems beyond his station in life. Zanele is a South African actress whom Conway lives with when he’s not on the boat repairing cables. Throughout the novel, she becomes more famous while Conway and Fennell are on the ocean, Conway to repair a significant break, Fennell to write about Conway and his crew.

The imagery of breaks in communication runs throughout the novel, as Fennell never understands Conway, and Conway and Zanele seem unable to communicate about what matters in their relationship. However, since the reader only sees that relationship through Fennell’s lens, it’s unclear if that is the case or if there is some other reason for the breakdown in their relationship.

McCann also explores the idea of repair, what one can and can’t mend, in a world that has become more and more digitally connected, but more and more emotionally fractured. Conway seems to reinvent himself, but Fennell also needs to mend himself in some important ways. Twist asks the reader to consider who they are and how they present that self to the world, but also if repair is possible in a world that seems so broken.

Twist by Colum McCann. Random House, March 2025.

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

Editor’s Choice :: Remember Us to Life

Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir by Joanna Rubin Dranger book cover image

Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir by Joanna Rubin Dranger
Ten Speed Graphic, April 2025

Told through a genre-defying blend of illustrations, photography, and found objects, Remember Us to Life chronicles Joanna Rubin Dranger’s investigation into her Jewish family’s history, spanning time, space, and three continents in search of her lost relatives. As discolored photos are retrieved from half-forgotten moth-eaten boxes, Joanna discovers the startling modernity and vibrancy of the lives her family never spoke about — and the devastating violence that led to their senseless murders.

Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Remember Us to Life recounts Joanna’s family’s immigration from Poland and Russia to Sweden and Israel, where her relatives found work, marriage, and community, blissfully unaware of the horrors to come. Interweaving these anecdotes and stories are historical accounts of the persecution of Jewish people in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia prior to and during World War II, as well as the antisemitic policies and actions of the supposedly neutral government of Sweden, Joanna’s home country. Joanna’s unflinchingly brave and intimate portrayal of one of history’s greatest tragedies will capture and break readers’ hearts.

[Editor’s Choice posts are not paid promotions. These are selected by NewPages to spotlight titles we want to share with our readers.]

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Book Review :: Antillia by Henrietta Goodman

Antillia by Henrietta Goodman book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Henrietta Goodman’s Antillia explores innocence, guilt, and the haunting specters of the past. The collection’s title references a mythical island, symbolizing both “the inaccessible” and the elusive nature of truth and self. Goodman’s lyric-narrative poems examine aspects of female identity and maternal grief.

Haunted by her son and various romantic partners, Goodman shares the complexities of these relationships, offering a candid examination of love and regret. She examines the “boys who get stuck, / who die or sleep in a chair in their mother’s / basement” and dissects “all the slapping and deception /…keeping score,” with a voice that is both lamenting and liberating. The collection’s strength lies in the air-clearing confrontations between past and present selves.

Through these portraits of “another me,” Goodman tells us of the loss of her son and allows readers to witness the intertwining of innocence and guilt in her exploration of maternal grief. In the opening poem, “The Puppy and Kitten Channel,” the poet uses a proxy to ask, “Do you ever feel completely ruined?” Through rhetorical inquiry, free association, and tracing the origins of the words “we use / to defend, or forgive” Goodman reveals their capacity for pain and solace.

At the heart of Antillia lies a lake that reflects “Delight,” “Death,” “Time,” and “Hope,” suggesting a dynamic relationship between self-portraiture and memory. Goodman reflects on the impossibility of reclaiming the past while acknowledging the potential for understanding within our memories: “So many years / I’ve wondered what it said, why it seems / so easy and so impossible to put back.”

In Antillia, Henrietta Goodman reminds us of the malleability of memory and how it shapes our present, emphasizing that “there’s no one / back there controlling any of this.” This collection is an eloquent testament to female resilience, maternal love, and grief’s burden — haunting and ultimately liberating.

Antillia by Henrietta Goodman. The Backwaters Press, March 2024.

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

New Book :: Poppy and Mary Ellen All Fed Up

Poppy and Mary Ellen All Fed Up: Book Two of the Frankenmuth Murder Mysteries by Roz Weedman and Susan Todd, Illustrations by Lane Trabalka book cover image

Poppy and Mary Ellen All Fed Up: Book Two of the Frankenmuth Murder Mysteries by Roz Weedman and Susan Todd, Illustrations by Lane Trabalka
Mission Point Press, October 2024

In Poppy and Mary Ellen All Fed Up, the punchy writer duo of Roz Weedman and Susan Todd welcome readers back to Frankenmuth, one of Michigan’s most famous and popular tourist towns. With a year-round population of only 5,000 residents, this Bavarian-themed town with its famous chicken dinners and year-round Christmas village draws more than three million visitors each year, making it the perfect setting to slink in and out unnoticed.

Poppy and Mary Ellen earned a reputation for themselves in the first book in the series when they (and a few canine friends) helped the police solve a double homicide, even beating the police to the capture. This time, though, Poppy finds herself topping the suspect list of the murder of a Mah Jongg-playing tourist.

Some familiar characters are back, both canine and human, there’s a titch of romance in the air with its own mystique, and Lane Trabalka’s chapter heading line drawings add to the intrigue and charm. Those who play Mah Jongg and follow conversations about “friendly games” will find themselves laughing out loud as the story centers around planning an upcoming Mah Jongg tournament. Weedman and Todd weave the elements of the game through the story with enough explanation that even non-players may be encouraged to pick up the game.

Although most of the story takes place in the popular and quirky confines of Frankenmuth, readers get to travel all the way to Nairobi in Book Two, but with Weedman and Todd crafting the twists and turns, everyone will need their seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The unnamed narrator of Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time, has recently received a promotion within The Ministry, moving from the Languages department to serve as a bridge for a new expat. However, her newly arrived charge is not new to the country, as he was born in England, but new to the time period. The Ministry has discovered a time door, and they’ve used it to bring a handful of people — who were about to die in their lifetimes — into the present to see how they assimilate.

Thus, she spends most of her time with Graham Gore, who should have died in an Arctic expedition in the nineteenth century that went terribly wrong, helping him to adapt to twenty-first century life. They meet up with other bridges and expats at various times, some of whom adjust better than others. The narrator makes it clear early on that readers shouldn’t bother trying to understand the logic of time travel, advice that is always worthwhile when reading any book that involves it.

One of the reasons the narrator has her job is because her mother was a refugee from Cambodia, so leaders in The Ministry think she will work well in such a situation. However, she reveals herself to be rather naïve about the realities of her job. There are other people who are interested in the expats, leading to the narrator’s not knowing whom to trust, as she doesn’t truly understand the situation she has found herself in. She also struggles to understand Graham, and he can’t comprehend her, either, as their class and race divisions complicate their relationship beyond the obvious time differences.

Bradley uses time travel to ask questions about history, but more about history as a narrative that people construct to help provide them with purpose and meaning, as well as to control others or their world. The narrator comes to understand that she has defined others without understanding them, shaping narratives about them and herself that lead her to make a number of poor decisions. The ending leaves the future open, though, as the narrator is learning how to revise the narratives she’s crafted.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Avid Reader Press, April 2025.

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

Book Review :: Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry

Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

As the title conveys, Imani Perry’s latest book uses the color blue to explore the history of Black Americans. Many of the historical figures and events in the collection of essays are well-known, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, George Washington Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Nina Simone. However, Perry also draws from the lives and stories of lesser-known artists, musicians, and historical figures to give a fuller view of the story of African Americans.

It’s the use of the color blue, though, that helps her reshape and refashion the histories she tells, digging deeper than the traditional stories even a well-educated reader might know about the famous and less so. For example, she draws on the ninth chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to explore the history of architectural blueprints, which then leads to a meditation on improvisation for when ideas don’t go according to plan, moving to a concluding paragraph on Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” which Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” inspired. She ends the brief essay by writing, “[Monk] dismantled every blueprint. He showed how it felt to be rescued. The exercise is clear in retrospect: act and build with love — when faced with the prospect of death. That’s how we live.” It is this associative style of writing that gives each essay its power, as Perry ties together seemingly disparate ideas to convey undercurrents throughout Black history.

The culminating effect of the essays is not one of a linear history where one can trace a supposed progress toward more rights or freedom. Instead, Black in Blues reveals how African Americans have moved through and around the dominant white culture, creating their own stories and art and history, a culture that most white people remain ignorant of beyond the names of a select few. She celebrates the life that has thrived within that world, as she writes in the final essay: “Death comes fast, frequent, and unfair. And we’re still here. We know how to breathe underwater. Living after death. It is a universe in blue.” Perry reminds readers of ways in which that universe is simultaneously awful and beautiful.

Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry. Ecco, January 2025.

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

Book Review :: Upstage by Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers

Upstage by Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Upstage, poet Bruce Andrews and photographer Sally Silvers create a vibrant and disorienting urban experience of New Jersey’s Asbury Park. This collaborative work stands out not just for its atmospheric visuals and “boombox” text but also for the way it invites readers to reconsider their relationship with the world around them, especially in the context of the chaotic pandemic era.

As viewers and readers traverse the haunted streets of the pandemic, Silvers’s keen eye for detail provides anatomical structure, while Andrews’s lively text serves as a rhythmic pulse, creating a hypnotic effect that draws us into their shared vision. Through close-ups of patterns within a pattern, Silvers’s photographs orient us, even as they dislocate. Each image evokes a landscape that feels both familiar and alien, urging viewers to look closer and question their perceptions.

Andrews complements this visual storytelling with polyphonic word blocks that invite us to experience the “verbal showdowns” within polymodal signage. Information campaigns, medical incentives, motivational speeches, food advertisements, graffiti tags, and “1-800” numbers “mulch” together in a sort of “handbook of capitalism.” Whether decontextualizing the whole by fragmentation, as Silvers does, or recontextualizing fragments into a new whole, as Andrews does, each artist queries what it means to witness our surroundings.

By playing with abstraction and emphasis, presenting seemingly random configurations that reveal a method within madness, the artists capture the absurd seriousness of our times. In Upstage, Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews have created a cultural portrait of modern life — a candid reflection on existence during tumultuous times. Their collaboration testifies to the resilience of art and creativity, showing us that even in isolation, meaningful connections can flourish as we navigate the strange beauty of our world together.

Upstage by Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2024.

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

Book Review :: Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza

Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

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

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

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

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

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

Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza. BlazeVOX [books], December 2024.

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

Clarity Press Titles Address the Urgent Issues of Our Time

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Clarity Press titles have appeared on university course lists, won major human rights awards, been endorsed by high UN and government officials, Pulitzer and Nobel Peace Prize winners, and Hollywood and other activist icons. Over 100 have been translated into 16 different languages. See flyer for new releases and visit our website to find out more.

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New Releases from Hidden Timber Books!

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Hidden Timber Books publishes stories that speak to historical, and cultural, experiences of past and present. Check out our new releases: books that tap into life in rural Wisconsin, loss and resilience as seen through “candor, humor, and clarity,” and a novel about a family navigating the racism of past and present St. Louis. View flyer & visit our website for more information.

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Colorado Authors League May 2025 Releases by Members

page 1 of the Colorado Authors League May 2025 releases by members
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members and a link to our website.

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Editor’s Choice :: Where do you live?

Where do you live?, Poetry by Dr. Hanaa Ahmad and Jennifer Jean book cover image

Where do you live?, Poetry by Dr. Hanaa Ahmad and Jennifer Jean
Arrowsmith Press, May 2025

In Where do you live?, Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr follow the great tradition of epistolary poetry. The poets, in different cultural circumstances, inflected over a great planetary arch from Mosul to Massachusetts, speak to each other, and us, about the stories that nurture, and the damage caused by the fantasts of power; of the pincered peril and the anxious peace of empire; of the hoped-for serenity and call to duty of neighborhoods, children and apricot trees; of myths and movies. In Jean’s words, “like love, music is perfectly untranslatable — / it gathers us together.” And in Jabr’s words, since poetry “introduced me to myself,” in these poems readers can be gathered and introduced to their widest selves. A beautiful rumination, with exquisite translations by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya, on soft and hard power, and on what it’s like to live with the yearning for home, whether you’re there or not.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

[Editor’s Choice posts are not paid promotions. These are selected by NewPages to spotlight titles we want to share with our readers.]

Book Review :: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

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

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

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

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

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie. Vintage, October 2024.

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

Editor’s Choice :: It All Felt Impossible by Tom McAllister

It All Felt Impossible by Tom McAllister book cover image

It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
Rose Metal Press, May 2025

In this meditative and lyrical collection, Tom McAllister challenges himself to write a short essay for every year he’s been alive. With each piece strictly limited to a maximum of 1,500 words, these 42 essays move fluidly through time, taking poetic leaps and ending up in places the reader does not expect. Funny, insightful, and open-hearted, It All Felt Impossible aims to tell the story of McAllister’s life through brief glimpses, anecdotes, and fragments that radiate outward and grapple with his place in the culture at large.

In the span of these essays, McAllister witnesses a monorail crash at a zoo, survives a tornado, plays youth sports for tyrannical coaches, grieves for dead parents, learns how to ride a bike as an adult, works long shifts making cheesesteaks, and more. Each annual offering is a search for meaning and connection, chronicled by an engaging and honest voice.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

[Editor’s Choice posts are not paid promotions. These are selected by NewPages to spotlight titles we want to share with our readers.]

Sponsored :: New Book :: The Murmur of Everything Moving

cover of The Murmur of Everything Moving by Maureen Stanton

The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir, Nonfiction by Maureen Stanton

University of Georgia Press, March 2025

When Maureen Stanton’s boyfriend, Steve, at 29, was diagnosed with cancer, they embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. Meanwhile, Steve’s childhood friend, Joey, a drug addict, sold Steve’s pain medication to pay for Steve’s experimental treatments. This beautiful and aching memoir is an odyssey through the difficult but exquisite terrain of love—romantic, brotherly, spiritual—in the face of mortality.

Winner of the Donald Jordan prize for Literary Excellence, the Sewanee Review nonfiction prize, and featured in New York Times “Modern Love” column, The Murmur of Everything Moving is a riveting memoir of love, loss, and longing. Novelist, Stephen Kiernan, who judged the DLJ contest, called it “beguiling, vivid, rich with loving devotion… a wonder of a book.” Andre Dubus III called it “a love song and tribute, a hymn of praise for each sacred moment given us … heartbreakingly beautiful.”

Publisher’s Weekly Booklife “Editor’s Pick” — “a stunning, true romance … a cinematic, powerful memoir of caregiving.”

Kirkus Reviews — “A poignant, evocative story of love, death, and survival. Stanton is a skilled writer whose prose sparkles with literary panache.”

Maureen Stanton is the author of three award-winning nonfiction books. Recognition for her writing includes the Iowa Review Award, The American Literary Review Award, The Sewanee Review award, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.

Sponsored :: New Book :: Crunchwrap Truth

Crunchwrap Truth by Kevin J.B. O'Connor book cover image

Crunchwrap Truth, Poetry by Kevin J.B. O’Connor
Bottlecap Press, May 2025

Crunchwrap Truth by Kevin J.B. O’Connor is a chapbook of absurdist political-food poems, inspired by the regal concoction from which it borrows its title. In existential poetry that probes the meaning of American citizenship in a post-capitalist and post-truth society, O’Connor constructs and conveys a peculiar moment in Western history. Inspired by the New York School and confessional/post-confessional approaches to narrating post-modernity, the author romps through a series of linked verse that is a delightful, page-turning experience to read. The book is available now from Bottlecap Press.

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

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

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

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

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

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

Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, A Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis by Melody Glenn. Beacon Press, July 2025.

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

Editor’s Choice :: Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest

Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest book cover image

Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, Edited by Joseph Shafer
Wesleyan University Press, May 2025

Meditations gathers together in one volume for the first time an extensive collection of the prose work of Barbara Guest (1920–2006), one of the major voices of twentieth century American literature. Known primarily as a poet, Guest worked in many styles, all represented herein: essays, lectures, art criticism, literary and art reviews, as well as forms of fiction, biography, poetic prose, drama, comics, and other mixed-genre pieces. This collection of the poet’s prose illuminates Guest’s singular genius, highlighting her structural awareness of language and placing her within the vanguard of American poetry. Much of her writing initially appeared in special editions, often through collaborations with visual artists. Lyrical and intellectually soaring, this collection is a treasure of insights into the relationship between language, image, and imagination. Joseph Shafer’s introduction provides a meaningful context for sixty years’ worth of critical and creative prose by one of America’s finest poets.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

[Editor’s Choice posts are not paid promotions. These are selected by NewPages to spotlight titles we want to share with our readers.]

Book Review :: Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones

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

Review by Aiden Hunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Kevin Brown

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

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

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

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

No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene. Tin House, March 2025.

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

Sponsored :: New Book :: Wrongful

Wrongful by Lee Upton book cover image

Wrongful, Fiction by Lee Upton

Sagging Meniscus Press, May 2025

When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.

Book Review :: For Today by Carolyn Hembree

For Today by Carolyn Hembree book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

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

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

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

For Today by Carolyn Hembree. Louisiana State University Press, January 2024.

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