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Book Review :: If I Had Said Beauty by Tami Haaland

'If I Had Said Beauty' by Tami Haaland poetry book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her fourth collection of poetry, If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland honors “known and unknown” ancestors and searches for herself within “The lines leading to this body.” In “Prelude,” the first poem, we learn the poet’s heritage is “mostly Scandinavian, then / British, Irish, German.” Haaland is as interested in “the traits of women and men who / have made me” as she is in the “lines… deeper.”

Her investigation of her people’s “migrations, / and landings,” “their stories, their histories” is geographical, genealogical, “mitochondrial,” psychological, and spiritual. Throughout the collection, the poet poses age-old philosophical and evolutionary questions about who we are and who we “want to be.”

The unstructured sonnet, contrapuntal, palindrome, and prose poem “give form, proportion” to Haaland’s inquiry. Each form provides either a “flip side,” doubling possible inheritances, or a “line between here / and not here,” bordering possible legacies. These “deliberate pairings” of content and form substantiate the exploration of “my recessive/dominant other.”

“Double, double.” While Haaland’s meditative lyrics honor her position between “My mother, long dead,” and “my son / ahead,” she admits she’s “not content with reduction to a few generations.” Haaland’s “in a long / conversation about omens.” Her poems are populated by “ghosts,” “angels,” “shadows,” and, in a “desire” to “expand the circle,” various other beings, including dogs, flies, and trees. Each is as much a “part of the conversation” as the “watcher,” “protector,” “coward,” and “romantic” aspects of herself.

Instead of a fixed identity, Haaland views herself in a process of “becoming” that allows her to continually rethink her existence, which in turn allows her poems to reframe it. Death’s “eccentric shadow” coexists with beauty’s “brilliance on a hill / covered in blossoms, each / a cluster, a spear.” And in Haaland’s poems, each is “a glimpse of the infinite.”

If I Had Said Beauty by Tami Haaland. Lost Horse Press, March 2025.

Book Review :: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a meditation on the suicide of her youngest son, James, who died at the age of nineteen. That death took place a bit over six years after the suicide of her older son, Vincent. This book is not an attempt to explain why James made the same decision as his older brother or to come to any sort of understanding of what Li and/or her husband could have done differently. Li is clear that speculation doesn’t do her or her husband or her sons any good at all. Instead, as the title of one of her chapters says, “Children Die, and Parents Go on Living.” One of the threads that runs through this book is the idea that she must take life as she finds it, not as it might have been.

One of the other main ideas is that of the abyss, which is where Li and her husband now find themselves. She reflects on the idea of grief and how some people view it as something one gets through, an idea that seems to repulse Li. She sees it as an insult to the dead if, at some point, she were to believe she has gotten through grief, dusted herself off, and gone back to life. Instead, she believes that she now lives in the abyss and will always live there, that the grief is simply a part of her life and that she will always shape herself around.

It might strike readers as odd, then, that Li talks about how she behaved after her son’s death, as she had a piano lesson days after receiving the news, in addition to her continuing her work writing a novel and teaching. If someone didn’t know her well, if they were only looking at the outside, it would seem her son’s death hadn’t affected her. However, as Li uses her title to remind readers, her way of dealing with grief is to continue doing what she loves and what makes her who she should be, just as nature will continue to grow, whatever happens in the world.

Li’s approach to grief is not one that some readers will share, which is all the more reason for them to read her book. We can never understand how others sustain themselves when such tragedy strikes their lives, but works such as Li’s provide an insight into at least one person’s way of processing such suffering. Reading such a work should provide us with more empathy not only for Li, but for ourselves and others, especially when we deal with grief and loss in ways others might not understand.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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.

Book Review :: Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten takes on authoritarians, autocrats, oligarchs, and fascists — terms she uses interchangeably — in Why Fascists Fear Teachers. The book is a fierce denunciation of the political movement working to destroy democracy, undermine trade unions, subvert multiculturalism, and decimate public education. It’s also a clear and passionate argument in support of teachers and public schools. “We cannot create a truly democratic, inclusive nation committed to opportunity for all without public schools,” she writes. “Fascists fight against public education because they want to control our minds, control our ideas, and control the future. And what do teachers do? They teach. It’s that simple.” 

Conversely, Weingarten writes, fascists support banning books, limiting the free exchange of ideas, and narrowing curricular offerings, all while simultaneously championing white, male, Christian supremacy. Moreover, the Trump administration has made privatizing education through universal vouchers and charter schools an explicit goal —shifts that the AFT and other unions have lambasted as wasteful of taxpayer money and often hurtful to students.  

The dichotomy Weingarten presents could not be clearer, with teachers on one side and fascists on the other.

Weingarten draws on history, from ancient societies to the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet, to expose the manifold harms caused by authoritarian rule. She also outlines the looming danger of fascist governance here in the U.S. and zeroes in on the harm caused by DOGE and Executive Orders outlawing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

Weingarten sugar-coats nothing; nonetheless, the book is not all doom and gloom. Multiple examples of teachers working with community residents to meet the needs of unhoused, hungry, and disabled students showcase teachers’ largely unheralded and inspiring work. Moreover, Weingarten is optimistic that we can derail the Trump agenda if we organize in the streets, in our union halls, and at the ballot box.

Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten, Penguin Random House, 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. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/

Book Review :: Atavists by Lydia Millet

Atavists by Lydia Millet book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Atavists, Lydia Millet’s latest collection of short stories, continues her preoccupation with the climate crisis, the backdrop (or centerpiece) to most of her recent writing. In these interlocking stories, she follows one family and various people connected to them, giving each character one story titled with something ended in -ist, such as “artist,” “mixologist,” or “optimist.” The “atavist” in the title raises the question of whether Millet means to imply that the characters are rediscovering some genetic characteristic after several generations of absence (perhaps a concern with the climate crisis) or are organisms that have characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism (ignoring the climate crisis, as generations of people have done). Or both, of course.

One of the main characters concerned with the climate crisis is Nick, who has attended Stanford to earn a degree in scriptwriting and who has moved back home to live with his parents and sister while he writes his first screenplay. Through various stories, it becomes clear that he is unable to write his fantasy screenplay, and he’s losing interest in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which causes him to lose his girlfriend, Chaya. He doesn’t see the point in most of what people do, given that there’s little chance of a foreseeable future. He does, however, find another girlfriend, Liza, who is taking a gap year from college. When her parents suggest volunteering, she finds purpose in helping residents of an assisted living facility understand their technology, which then morphs into helping them simply manage life.

Millet also shows characters who are not quite who they seem, sometimes through a clear contrast between the title of their story and how they behave, but also sometimes through their use or misuse of technology. For example, “Pastoralist” reveals the main character, Les, to be a predatory user of women, finding those he believe will be insecure because of their weight, then staying with them for no more than a few months until he gets bored and moves on to what he would describe as another sheep that needs to be sheared.

In the final story, “Optimist,” Millet makes it clear that she’s not one when it comes to people’s acknowledging the reality of the environmental destruction they have already caused and that only continues to worsen. She does portray characters who care, though, both about the environment and one another, even if they don’t always know what to do with those emotions, which helps elevate these stories beyond simply drawing attention to the climate crisis to a portrayal of our day-to-day lives.

Atavists by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, 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.

Book Review :: King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson

Book Review :: King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

With acrimonious relations going back almost 50 years, it can be easy to forget that the United States and Iran were once close allies. After a CIA-backed military coup granted shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi authoritarian powers in 1953, U.S. presidents and policymakers deemed Iran a source of Middle East stability for a quarter century and growing demand for oil during the 1970s made Iran’s elite rich. By the end of that decade, a dying shah’s admittance to American exile for cancer treatment triggered a diplomatic hostage crisis and the end of the special relationship.

“Collapse on the magnitude of that which occurred in Imperial Iran in the 1970s simply cannot be attributable to the actions of one king,” Scott Anderson writes in his new book, King of Kings, explaining that the incompetence or corruption of many actors played a role in the Iranian Revolution. Anderson provides a compelling narrative relying on previous research, documentation, and his own interviews with inside sources like Americans employed in Iran at the time and the shah’s now octogenarian widow, Farah, still living in American exile.

Though a hostile government prevents a truly clear view of the event, King of Kings succeeds in giving Western readers a picture of a revolution that’s had great consequences for both the Middle East and the West to this day. It may not be light reading, but those looking for a better understanding of how modern Iran came to be will certainly benefit.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson. Doubleday, September 2025.

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

Book Review :: A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner

A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Janet Kintner graduated from law school in 1968, she was rejected by employers who told her point-blank that they did not – and would not – hire a woman.  This, despite the fact that she had passed the bar exam in Arizona and California and had graduated at the top of her class. While she eventually secured a much-loved position with the Legal Aid Society in San Diego, Kintner never forgot the sexist banter she heard or the demeaning comments directed at her by male attorneys and courthouse staff. But she refused to quit. 

A subsequent job with the City Attorney’s office gave her the opportunity to prosecute exploitative businesses, and she developed a niche in the then-developing field of consumer law. Her work drew notice and, in 1976, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed her to the bench. At the time of her swearing in, Kintner was 31 years old and seven months pregnant. Two years later, a contested election to maintain the seat forced her to face two male adversaries, one of whom hurled a near-constant barrage of personal insults at her. Her account of the successful campaign – when she was again pregnant – and of juggling a toddler and a demanding judgeship, is both humorous and harrowing. 

Kintner worked as a judge for a total of 47 years before retiring, and her look back, A Judge’s Tale, is important. Nonetheless, while she offers a stark denunciation of sexist behavior, she seems wholly disconnected from the many feminist campaigns waged by law students and attorneys to win equity and respect. Likewise, she alludes to unspecified marital discord, but offers few clues about why she waited three decades to call it quits. They’re disappointing omissions. Still, A Judge’s Tale is an inspiring book, detailing one woman’s quest for recognition and power. It’s a worthwhile memoir.

A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for Her Place on the Bench by Janet Kintner. She Writes Press, December 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. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/

Book Review :: Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

“Loss is a sentry,” writes Kimberly Blaeser in Ancient Light. In her sixth collection of poems, the Anishinaabe poet, photographer, scholar, and activist stands “in the shadow of old losses,” watching over the human and ecological wreckage caused by some of the most devastating social issues of our time, including the epidemic of violence against Indigenous Women, the “hidden graves” at Native American boarding schools, the unrepatriated Ancestors who “wait” on museum “shelves in numbered boxes,” the disruptions to daily life, work, and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Politics / a super spreader,” and extractive environmental practices like “clearcutting” and “copper mines.”

Blaeser fills her narrative, lyric, and visual poems “with left behind,” with “an abundance we make / of the broken.” Each poem is a “vessel of fire,” carrying the “torch of language” to pay homage to Ancestors and praise legacies of “kinship” with all beings and land. Through poems, photographs, and drawings, Blaeser offers Indigenous stories and lifeways as a means of hope and resilience: “Let us mask / ourselves in hope — all broken of these histories.”

In stunning contrast to “this legacy” of trauma, Blaeser offers a series of ten poems, scattered throughout the collection, entitled “The Way We Love Something Small.” Each of these poems offers “a writ consolation” and “a mended silence.” By connecting to the “sweet notes” of other beings such as “spring peepers,” “newborn mice,” an “egret heronry,” and “Vowel sounds from the land” — “each oldest song / survivance.”

Throughout Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser artfully balances speaking “ill of the living” and blessing “the hollowed out sorrows.” Emerging from the despair of “these histories” and “lost futures,” Blaeser’s ceremonial poems use words to “transfigure” this “memory-tangle,” this pain-tangle into an “ancient ballad of continuance.” Ancient Light is a compassionate, wise, and necessary book.

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser. University of Arizona 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.

Book Review :: Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When award-winning professor and writer Ashley Farmer (Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era) discovered that there were no full-length biographies of influential Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1996), she set out to rectify the omission. The result, Queen Mother, charts Moore’s ascent as a community leader, first as a follower and supporter of Marcus Garvey, then as a leader in the US Communist Party, and finally as an advocate of reparations to the Black community for the sin of slavery and the continuing damage wrought by racism and white supremacy. It’s a powerful, insightful, and evocative look at a woman who eschewed feminism but made sure that her voice was heard by the men who led the movements she championed.

For most of her life, Moore was a revered speaker, writer, and activist, and spent decades working to galvanize support for the establishment of a separate Black nation within the US. She was also outspoken in her opposition to the integrationist efforts of those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed racial equality was both preferable and possible. Moore vehemently disagreed, and her efforts brought her into contact with the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, as well as leaders of numerous newly independent African Nations.

Dubbed Queen Mother, she hobnobbed with controversial figures including dictator Idi Amin and Louis Farrakhan, and spoke out in favor of polygamy. Thrice married and the mother of one son, she nonetheless made “the movement” her priority. While readers may question this and other choices made by Moore, Queen Mother is a brilliant look at one woman’s passionate quest for social justice, peace, and racial equity. It’s a beautifully drawn and provocative portrait of a fascinating activist and leader.

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer. Pantheon Books, November 2025.

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

Book Review :: The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton

The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”

The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”

The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”

In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”

The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.

The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton. Delete Press, August 2024.

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

Book Review :: Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s highly anticipated second novel [following 2018’s My Sister, The Serial Killer], brings readers into the middle-to-upper-class community of Lagos, Nigeria, and its adjacent suburbs and tells a complicated story that questions the role of fate in determining how our lives unfold.

The story centers on the economically comfortable Falodin family, whose older generation believes that the household’s women are plagued by a long-standing curse that prohibits them from forming lasting heterosexual relationships. For cousins Ebun and Monife, both of whom consider themselves modern and well-educated, the idea that they can be punished for the sins of past generations seems preposterous. At the same time, their intellectual skepticism runs head-on into tradition, and when Monife unexpectedly dies at age 25, her death leaves 21-year-old Ebun scrambling to make sense of what has happened.

Her difficulties are made worse by the premature birth of her daughter, Eniiye, on the day of Monife’s burial. Moreover, her emotional upheaval is exacerbated by the fact that Eniiye looks shockingly similar to Monife, a reality that has neighbors, family, and friends dubbing the child a reincarnation. This not only leaves Ebun reeling but puts tremendous pressure on the child who wants little more than to be herself.

It’s a soap opera, for sure, but Braithwaite is a spectacular writer who manages to make this a compelling and satisfying intergenerational drama. Although some of what transpires is predictable, the deft handling of Eniiye’s coming of age and her subsequent pursuit of romance is touching and emotionally resonant. Cursed Daughters is told in the alternating voices of Ebun, Eniiye, and Monife and moves back and forth between several decades. But as the puzzle pieces come into frame, secrets, silences, and superstitions are parsed and upended. The end result is that Eniiye does what her foremothers could not and emerges as an autonomous, bold, and independent woman. It’s a transition to cheer.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Doubleday, November 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 :: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, takes the form a of diary — or a devotional, perhaps, as it does reveal a type of devotion — of an unnamed narrator who withdraws from the world. The narrator first comes to the convent as a way to escape the world, which has begun to seem overwhelming to her. Her husband has moved to take a new job, and the narrator thinks it’s obvious that the relationship is over. However, the main motivator seems to be her feeling that she can’t do any good in the world, which had been her career and focus.

She ran the Threatened Species Rescue Center, but she now feels she has done as much harm as she had good. Thus, she visits the convent to take some time to reboot. In the second section of the novel, however, she has become a participant in the community, though not quite on the path to become a nun. In fact, she doesn’t really have any faith in God, though she likes the idea of attention as a type of devotion. She left rather abruptly, as she references people from her previous life who feel betrayed by her quick departure, especially given that she didn’t notify them.

The convent is also near where the narrator grew up, and she seems to be mourning the relatively recent death of her mother — who had died before her first visit to the convent — who did good in the community in a quiet manner, unlike the narrator’s work. She interacts with a schoolmate from her childhood, Helen Parry, an activist nun who has come to the convent during the pandemic to deliver the bones of a nun who worked with her, but who began her time at this convent. The narrator admits that she and others bullied Helen when she was in school, though Helen doesn’t seem to concern herself with that part of her childhood, as she had a mother who struggled with mental illness and was abusive.

This novel is pared down to the essentials, much like the landscape that surrounds the convent, focusing on the narrator’s reflections on what it means to live a good life, mainly through the contrast between an ascetic life as a nun and that of a highly visible activist. Neither the narrator nor Wood attempt to provide an answer to that question, as they want readers to answer it for themselves.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Riverhead Books, February 2025.

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

Book Review :: Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Heart, Be at Peace, reads like a collection of interlocked short stories, with each chapter having a different character as the narrator and focus. Thus, the novel shows several scenes from different perspectives, changing the way the reader sees each character again and again. As such, Ryan’s focus is on character and community, as opposed to plot. The characters live in a small town in Ireland where everybody seems to know or be related to one another, but the area is changing, largely due to a group of young men selling drugs. The question that runs through the novel, then, is whether anybody will do anything about that problem and, if so, what will they do and who will do it.

At the core of the novel, though, is the idea of heart — as the title implies — and relationships. Some of those are traditional, romantic relationships, such as Bobby and Triona, who have what seems to be a solid marriage and family, though Bobby worries that he’s worse than his father was; or Sean and Réaltín, who don’t have a healthy marriage, though Sean tries to find a way to set them back on course, taking an unhealthy way to try to get there.

There are also a number of parent-child relationships or even grandparent-child connections. Millie develops a bond with her grandmother, Lily, whom people believe to be a witch, a description that might be accurate, only to risk that relationship because she begins dating Augie, the main drug dealer in town. Mags’ father Josie tries to rebuild the connection with his son Pokey, who has just gotten out of jail for fraud, and the relationship with his daughter whom he pushed away because of her sexual orientation.

Throughout the novel, characters define and redefine what love looks like for them and for others, often through the question of what they’re willing to do for those around them. Those answers often surprise them and those they love as much as they do the reader, but they can’t deny their hearts, even when they lead them astray, but especially when they lead them back to those they need.

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan. Viking, May 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.

Book Review :: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Nussaibah Younis’s debut, Women’s-Prize-shortlisted novel, Fundamentally, follows Nadia, a young woman from England who begins a job working for the United Nations deradicalizing women who joined ISIS. She has no training for the job, only an article she wrote in graduate school, and she takes the job to get out of an unhealthy relationship as much as for any other reason. She is out of her depth, as she readily admits and as her new co-workers can clearly see. However, she begins working as best she can on a program, which leads her to go to a refugee camp in Iraq, where she’s based, to meet the women there.

Everything changes when she meets Sara, a young Muslim woman from England, who reminds Nadia of herself when she was younger. Nadia was once a devout Muslim, but she has left her faith behind, which led to a falling out from her mother, exacerbated by Nadia’s relationship with Rosy, her roommate and sometime lover (Nadia believes it’s more than sometimes). Sara doesn’t engage in the programs Nadia begins, but they talk almost every time Nadia comes to the camp, and Nadia begins planning ways she can help Sara. Part of the problem with that help comes from the UN itself, as Younis ‘sends up the bureaucracy’ and in-fighting that prevents any true progress from occurring. Nadia angers almost everybody involved, but then finds a way to placate them again, mainly through providing them with money through budget lines and some sort of control, or at least the illusion of it.

However, when Nadia tries to get Sara out of the refugee camp and back home, a number of circumstances prevent that from happening, so Nadia goes outside of the traditional UN structure to try to help Sara. She has help from her co-workers, who seem as disenchanted with the organization as Nadia does, but she begins to realize that Sara is not quite who she seems to be. Younis uses her comic novel to critique Western views of Muslims, as well as those organizations that work to help, but often find themselves out of their depth, all while creating characters readers can both laugh at and resonate with.

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Tiny Reparations Books, February 2025.

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

Book Review :: A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston

A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston mainly spotlights her personal story, beginning with her focus on running and dieting to lose weight and the unhappiness that brought, leading to her discovery of weightlifting and the varieties of strength that came with it. She weaves in her relationships that reflect the emotional strength she ultimately developed from weightlifting, as well as her relationship with her mother. Last, Johnston clearly uses research to help her view the world at large, so she works in a variety of sources that talk about weightlifting and dieting, especially as it relates to women.

My only complaint about the book comes from the fact that I’m a runner, and Johnston didn’t have a positive experience there, but that’s because she connected it to weight loss and diet culture. One aspect of lifting she values — the importance of fueling to perform and the need to recover — is similarly important for those of us who try to run our best times, as she does with lifting. Though, to her point, when she was focused on running, the conversation around weight and diet was much less healthy than it is now. That said, her critique of diet culture is spot on, as she moves away from a system and culture that repeatedly tells people — especially women — to deny themselves, then criticizes them when they fail to do so.

Johnston also presents the positives of lifting, especially within the gym, where she expected to find a masculine approach that wouldn’t welcome her. When she reports a man filming her, the two young men working the desk act quickly, confronting the man and banning him from the gym. When she struggles to complete a lift on the first day, Dimitrios, an older Greek man who spends hours in the gym each day, helps her out, but encourages her, as opposed to shaming her.

Johnston not only builds physical strength, but that development leads to her inner development, as she leaves an unhealthy relationship and begins to develop a stronger sense of self. In fact, she becomes her best self by the end of the book, stronger in every way, a heavy lift that she has worked toward for years and finally accomplishes.

A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting by Casey Johnston. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette), 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.

Book Review :: I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee

I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

“I never knew if I was trying to win my mother’s heart or God’s when I wrote poems,” says Li-Young Lee in his new chapbook, I Ask My Mother to Sing. Both figures feature prominently in the slim volume that collects mother-themed poems from each of Lee’s six collections since 1986, along with seven new poems. It’s the latest in a series of “new and collected” chapbooks from notable late-career poets, including Rae Armantrout’s climate change poems and Yusef Komunyakaa’s love poems.

The book’s title poem alludes to Lee’s mother and grandmother wistfully singing songs about the old China from which they were exiled following the Communist revolution. A rocky childhood in Indonesia and other countries hostile to ethnic Chinese on his way to the U.S. colors both Lee’s poems and his close maternal feelings. Not many people, after all, can credibly say that their mother carried them “across two seas and four borders, / fleeing death by principalities and powers,” as he writes in “The Blessed Knot.”

This collection is well-timed following Lee’s 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and last year’s well-received The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton). Whether readers are new to these poems or already familiar with Lee’s work, they can get a great feel for a classic poet at a reasonable price. As both a reader and the editor of a chapbook-focused magazine, I hope Wesleyan University Press keeps these gems coming.

I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee ed. Oliver Egger. Wesleyan University Press, August 2025.

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

Book Review :: DEED by torrin a. greathouse

Deed by Torrin A. Greathouse book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In DEED, torrin a. greathouse delves into the origins of word and action, crafting a vibrant “queer lexicon” that reflects new possibilities for engaging with trans life and sexuality. This collection, while acknowledging themes of betrayal, consciously steps away from a trauma-centric narrative. The poems are infused with a sense of liberation, free from the “stigma” often associated with discussions of trans desire and chronic illness. Although they carry a history of violence and oppression intertwined with desire and choice, the poems embrace a refreshing, unapologetic exploration of intimacy without guilt.

One of the most striking aspects of this collection is the way words transition from meaning something to doing something, combining etymological “miracle” and mythological “metaphor.” A “verb can carry many meanings.” Take “swallow”: to resist expressing; to believe unquestioningly; to cause to disappear; the muscular movement of the esophagus. This range of definitions offers greathouse the possibilities of “What language is there for survival.”

The poet’s style exhibits remarkable control, perhaps a response to the intense subject matter, which includes themes of transition, sex work, and the complexities of dominant-submissive relationships. Notably, greathouse employs poetic forms such as the “burning haibun” and “cleave tanka.” Each embodies a sense of duality, wherein two expressions cleaved together or apart create a dynamic interplay of ideas. This structural doubleness echoes the content, “born / from the severance of” — transitioning from victimization to empowerment through sexuality. In these chimeric forms, greathouse creates transformations of context and meaning.

At times, greathouse invites patience from the reader with phrases like “Bear with me,” hinting at the demanding nature of her subject matter while simultaneously encouraging an engagement with the profound exploration of identity and desire within the poetry. In “trusting the broken / / machine of my desire,” torrin A. greathouse is held by words and creates new “cognates” for belonging.

DEED by torrin a. greathouse. Wesleyan University Press, August 2024.

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

Book Review :: The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

If one were to look in the acknowledgements at the end of The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien’s new novel, it would appear as if she has written traditional historical fiction, given the number of books and authors she references. However, her novel is more complex than that. There’s one main plotline that involves Lina, who has run away from Foshan, China, it seems, with her father. They now live beside the Sea, though what sea that is varies based on who one asks. They almost seem to be in a temporary refugee resettlement camp, as many people stay there for brief periods of time, then leave on ships. Lina and her father, Wui Shin, stay there for years, though, as her father is sick.

When they fled — the reader finds out why in the middle section of the book, which flashes back to Wui Shin’s younger days — Lina’s father took three books from a series of books on explorers; Lina even complains that they were not her favorite three, which is why they were less worn than the others. The three explorers are Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt, as the series authors included those who explored mentally as well as geographically.

Lina and her father’s room in a building seems to be outside of time in some way — the connection between time and space is a recurring theme in the novel — and their room connects to a room where three people live: Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher. When they find out about the three books Lina has read and reread, they point out how much the books have omitted, and each of them tell her all that’s missing from those three people’s lives, about which they seem to know much more than they should.

What ties the novel together is the theme of oppression and power, as Wui Shin and Lina are fleeing an oppressive Chinese regime, much as Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt all had to deal with people in power who tried to repress their thinking, as well as physically oppressing or killing those who disagreed with them. Thien has crafted a work of historical fiction that connects several characters who try to survive, recording their lives and struggles, so that those who live in a time where there are still those who try to suppress ideas and oppress people can find connection and hope.

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien. W.W. Norton, 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.

Book Review :: Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman

Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Jill Hoffman’s Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves features a candid and unfiltered poetics that demystifies the fame surrounding poets and writers. This reflects her long-standing involvement as a poet and editor of Mudfish magazine and Box Turtle Press in New York City. Hoffman’s poems read like “a story streamed forth / like a show on Netflix, seasons of episodes / that hook you into long nights of binge- / watching.” Hoffman’s poetry is confessional in the truest sense, free of pretension and deeply human.

Her poems sometimes take the form of aubades, sonnets, ekphrasis, villanelles, or fairy tales, but they are most often written as epistles, inviting readers to become confidants. Hoffman’s writing is reminiscent of the New York School poets and includes name-drops of figures like John Ashbery, one of the most renowned among them. Her style is vivid, urban, and unafraid, weaving together themes of medical concerns, old age, and death, with relationship desires and editorial responsibilities, featuring kimonos, “clogged toilets,” a “tree wearing mermaid earrings,” and a dog named Vermeer, along with plenty of anecdotes about dog walking and dinner parties.

Through her everything-out-in-the-open poems, readers gain insight into Hoffman as a writer confronting her own biases regarding her “privileged heart” while simultaneously addressing her Jewish heritage. She also reveals her experiences as a mother estranged from her daughter, who she feels has “betrayed” her. Beneath the lively and playful nature of these poems lies the deep pain of their fractured relationship.

As she weighs her life “on the scales,” Hoffman’s humanity shines through her imperfect responses, faux pas, and awkward moments. By sharing her “old funny life / Of heartbreak / And ecstasy” in this sincere manner, she helps dismantle the taboos surrounding artistic, diasporic, and societal expectations, offering a book “to make a reader fall in love.”

Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves by Jill Hoffman. Box Turtle 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 :: Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross

Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In Stronger, Michael Joseph Gross gives a historical overview of the importance of muscle throughout one’s life by centering on three different people and areas. Gross’s background as an investigative reporter shows as he divides the book into three sections: one that focuses on Charles Stocking, a professor of classics and kinesiology, and draws on how the Greeks and Romans viewed strength; a second with Jan Todd as the core, showing how women’s strength developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the final portion building on Maria Fiatarone Singh’s research on strength in older adults.

Throughout the book, Gross uses a wide range of resources, as his acknowledgements and notes sections make clear, to make the argument that strength training, especially through heavy lifting, benefits people in all areas of health, no matter their background, age, gender, or any other identifying aspect. The experts he refers to point out how medicine and politics have overlooked the importance of building strength, focusing on pills and policies that are less effective.

Strength isn’t a how-to manual, but a work that should serve as an inspiration to begin the journey of building strength, whatever that looks like at any stage of life, drawing on stories from Stocking, Todd, and Singh to show how everyone can benefit from incorporating strength training into their lives. The research that surrounds the information from Stocking, Todd, and Singh’s reinforces the work they have done to make a compelling argument that building strength can help us all live longer and healthier lives.

Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross. Dutton, 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.

Book Review :: More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall

More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Poet, essayist, and activist Margaret Randall’s latest book, More Letters from the Edge, follows the April 2025 release of Letters From the Edge, a series of chronologically-organized excerpts from written exchanges between the noted author and five intellectuals and artists on the political left. In More Letters, Randall continues this pattern. This time, however, she zeroes in on her communications with poet-writer-teacher Arturo Arango; former member of the Weather Underground Kathy Boudin (1943-2022); graphic artist and painter Jane Norling; and retired museum curator Robert Schweitzer. The emails and letters that Randall includes are fascinating, allowing readers to glimpse the ways these progressive activists have blurred the artificially constructed line that typically separates personal life from political struggles.

In fact, although most of the missives center on politics and social concerns – the struggle to earn enough to pay the bills; growing censorship and repression in Cuba, and the deleterious impact of the long-standing US blockade of the island; the ethical, racial and gender dynamics surrounding U.S. museum exhibitions; and whether violence can ever be justified in pursuit of social betterment – this is a moving celebration of friendship. Indeed, the connections between Randall and the people she corresponds with reveal deep bonds that have flourished despite periodic set-backs and obstacles.

It’s an intriguing showcase for relationships that are based on shared, and sometimes evolving, values. Randall calls her friends outriders and says that all four serve as ”bridges between cultures, between languages, between ideas. They bring people together and strengthen communities.”

The same can be said of Randall. More Letters models what it means to live an engaged life and maintain a steadfast commitment to peace and progressive social justice while simultaneously pursuing personal fulfillment. It’s an inspiring, revelatory book.

More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations by Margaret Randall. New Village 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 :: The Slip by Lucas Schaefer

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The basic premise of Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, The Slip, is simple: Nathaniel Rothstein went missing in the summer of 1998, and he’s still missing more than a decade later. However, it takes almost five hundred pages to explore the characters who are closely related to that disappearance — his uncle, Bob Alexander; his supervisor/mentor, David Dalice; and Sasha, his 1-900 Russian girlfriend, of sorts — and those who seem to circle loosely around what happened — Miriam Lopez, a police officer who wasn’t even on the force in the 1990s; Alexis Cepeda, an up-and-coming boxer; and Ed Hooley, a troubled, middle-aged man who appeared at the boxing gym around which all the characters circle (Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym) out of nowhere.

“The slip” is a move in boxing where one dodges a punch by seeming to move one’s head, but actually creates the move through an adjustment of the legs. The first half of the novel tends to focus on the fact that nobody in the novel is exactly who they say they are, some because they don’t yet know who they are, especially the younger characters; some because they don’t want others to know who they really are; and some because they can’t seem to stop being somebody they’re not. As Schaefer moves later in the novel, though, he begins raising larger questions around race, immigration, and policing, all of which connect to the first half because there are also characters who are unable or unwilling to see others as they truly are.

In some cases, characters grow into their new selves, such as one character who transitions from male to nonbinary to female, ultimately becoming comfortable being who she’s always wanted to be. Others, though, put on a face to match the world’s expectations of who they should be, and that face ultimately becomes their face, even when such a change causes them to lose part of the goodness of who they once were.

Ultimately, the novel explores the question of how one defines themselves, for both good and ill. Like many American novels, it’s concerned with identity, as the relatively young country still is. It shows an Austin, Texas, that is changing in ways that it might not like, just as the U.S. has changed in the twentieth century in ways that lead to citizens not seeing each other as they are. Schaefer has written a substantial novel that’s asking important questions at a time when those questions need better answers.

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. Simon & Schuster, June 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.

Book Review :: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The narrator of Ocean Vuong’s second novel, Hai, is a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant whose life isn’t following the traditional stereotype. Though he was the first in his family to attend college, he dropped out and returned home to New Gladness, Connecticut, a fictional town with struggles that mirror so many cities that once were centers of industry. He tells his mother he’s been accepted to medical school in Boston, but he actually intends to jump from a bridge. An eighty-something-year-old woman in the house next to the river, Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant, stops him from jumping, and he becomes her caretaker as she descends into dementia.

The core of the novel is Hai’s job at HomeMarket, a restaurant clearly modeled on Boston Market, where he forms meaningful relationships with BJ, Maureen, Wayne, Russia, and Sony (his cousin). Each person has struggles and dreams, wanting to move on from the low-wage job, and they each support one another as best they can. That’s especially true with Hai and Sony, given their family relationship, as Sony’s mother is in prison, and Sony is living in a group home, as he has been diagnosed with autism and is unable to live on his own.

While Hai helps others with their problems, he is unable to manage his drug addiction. He has recently come out of three weeks at a rehab facility, but he has begun using again, largely drawing from the drugs Grazina’s husband had around the house before he died. The shadow of the Vietnam war hangs over the novel, as Sony believes his father was a soldier in the war, but Sony is obsessed with the Civil War, even favoring the Southern side, given that he and Hai are from the Southern part of Vietnam, ignoring the racism that motivated the South. The novel is also set in the financial crisis of 2008, reinforcing the decline of New Gladness, and leading to Hai’s lack of employment options in the town.

Vuong wants his readers to see those people who survive on low-wage jobs that literature often overlooks and the ways in which they help each other do so. Rather than competing with one another for hours, when a regional manager wants BJ to fire one of the crew, they try to volunteer to give up some shifts for each other. Though each of them have concerns of their own, they create a type of family in a place most readers wouldn’t expect to find one.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Penguin 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.

Book Review :: The Utopians by Grace Nissan

The Utopians by Grace Nissan book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Utopians, Grace Nissan provides a tangible exploration of an artist’s fascination with Thomas More (1478–1535) and his fictional work, Utopia, published in 1516. Nissan’s book resonates with and responds to More’s in three distinct ways. Nissan’s text is assembled from the language “parts available” in More’s. The Utopians features a series of “Dear More” letters and includes a serial poem entitled “The World,” which underscores the tensions between origins and change. “The first world was a world, the second invention. The first world was a world, the second critique.” To survive, Nissan’s “second world had to cannibalize” More’s “first world.”

While Thomas More’s narrative primarily depicts the religious, social, and political customs of a fictional island, Nissan’s narrative addresses the current socio-political upheaval “in terms of money.” It highlights the devastating consequences of capitalism’s “territorial lust and imperial phantoms,” and the chaos caused by the relentless pursuit of “private property” and the “production of luxury.” These situations reflect the indifference of the wealthy toward the “miracles” achieved by those who contribute their labor to “mend roads / clean out ditches / repair bridges.”

As The Utopians is also a formal exploration of artistic “invention” and “critique,” it emphasizes the need to confront “prison & syntax.” Throughout the collection, the refrain “I must tell you about…” is supplemented by: “the Utopians,” “the towns,” their “debates,” “wars,” “scribes,” “language,” and “death.” This leads to a “Semantic satiation of the world.”

Being “starved of meaning” and “losing meaning through repetition” results in a world “grim & desolate.” The critique appears to have succeeded only in a reshuffling that “rebuilt the things it abolished, in negation.” “History” comes back. Nissan’s lyric elegiac poetry, reflecting social transformation and political upheaval, reads like an “epitaph.” After all, “aren’t all human beings / sort of war damage”?

The Utopians by Grace Nissan. Ugly Duckling Presse, May 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.

Book Review :: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Though Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book was published in 2021, it has only become more relevant with the rise of and reliance on AI. O’Gieblyn explores how we think about this emerging technology and the effects of that thought process on our humanity and theology. She draws on a variety of philosophers, especially those from the middle part of the twentieth century who were dealing with the horrors of World War II and the role technology played in it, as well as her personal experience, as she attended a fundamentalist Bible college before leaving her faith behind.

One of the main ways O’Gieblyn thinks through technology’s role in and effects on our lives is through the metaphors we use, as we often refer to ourselves, especially our minds/brains, as machines — for example, we talk about processing information or experiences, as if our minds are CPUs or servers. Similarly, we anthropomorphize technology, a comparison that has only become more pronounced as computers, especially AI, have begun to mimic humans more convincingly — many of us use he/she pronouns to refer to our GPS, to name one example.

O’Gieblyn ties all of these comparisons to theology, as we have begun to speak of computers and AI as having predictive capabilities, as when a website suggests a book or movie we might like. Since even the creators of some algorithms and AI admit they don’t quite know how they work, they become like a god that is beyond our understanding. The problem then occurs when we make them into a sovereign god — like the Calvinist God whom humans should not question because of their omnipotence and omniscience — as we have begun trusting machines to make decisions. Thus, we lose our humanity, depending too much on something we see as beyond us.

O’Gieblyn wants to remind readers of the stakes in such an off-loading, as technology that doesn’t take our humanity into consideration (or humans who don’t realize what they’re giving up) will lead to a technology and to lives without purpose or meaning.

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Doubleday, August 2021.

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.

Book Review :: In the Wake by Ariel Machell

In the Wake by Ariel Machell book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Comet Neowise was visible in the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky during July 2020. A group of friends “camping near the water to see” the comet serves as the backdrop for Ariel Machell’s debut chapbook, In the Wake, which explores the theme of “fleetingness,” asking: “How much will we allow to pass us by?”

Predominantly composed of prose poems, the collection is an apostrophe to the Willamette River, an elegy for past intimacy, a celebration of cosmic phenomena, and introspective “thinking about what made an ending.” The poems alternate between addressing Memory as an intimate other and recounting the camping trip when the comet “erupted” into the group’s shared vision, propelling readers toward philosophical inquiry about the essence of memory and how it navigates the complexities of time and distance.

Machell’s writing is firmly rooted in the river’s landscape and the relentless nature of memory, demonstrating a rich eco-philosophical elegiac lyricism. Her poetics prioritize felt experience over narrative clarity, offering deep intimacy while purposefully omitting specifics of the betrayal. “The sadness — I refused to explain it.” This absence inspires further inquiry: Does the origin of a feeling matter, or is the emotion itself the primary focus? The lack of definitive answers is among the collection’s strengths, embracing the “indefinite” with vulnerability.

Machell captures the “idea,” “image,” and “feel of” grief without resolution, allowing each poem to stir with the potential to “wake.” A vigil, disturbed water, an emergence — the triple entendre of the collection’s title allows “Possibility to do all the heavy work.” The title allows the poet-speaker to mourn the end of a romantic relationship, navigate the disturbed water left behind memory’s boat, and to catalyze “Waking up.” Some endings are beginnings.

In the Wake by Ariel Machell. Finishing Line Press, October 2024.

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

Book Review :: My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia

My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia book cover image

Review by Jennifer Martelli

In her poem, “Dead Leaves and Lost Daughters,” Elizabeth Sylvia writes, “Mania splits the mind like a pomegranate, red shell vexed / to mount a spine of arils. Memory, a scattering of seeds.” These seeds are planted throughout Sylvia’s newest collection, My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties. Here, memories take the form of ex-boyfriends, Facebook posts of an old mothers’ group, the shame of a father’s “rattly car / he bought off the town drunk. . .” The anxiety, rendered masterfully by this poet’s clear-eyed writing, is the ever-present tightrope balance between the speaker and her past, which lies fitfully on her shoulders.

The concept of the mother — both the speaker’s and the speaker as mother — underscores this tension. In her sonnet crown, “Mother’s Day,” Sylvia writes, “Midlife heat / flares in my chest, igniting old hurts.” The speaker’s estrangement from her mother is compounded by her own mothering,

                                               “See,” I tell no one
        who is listening, “I’ve fucked up less
        than others might have, not let emotion
        curdle into rage, repressed regrets” —
        and still, I know my own daughter sees
        I haven’t spoken to my mom in weeks.

The sonnet — that little song — is the perfect form for this emotional struggle. The sonnet insists upon constriction, both in line length and in sound. Sylvia constructs a sense of stasis by writing a crown of seven sonnets, each linked by motherhood, and by enclosing the whole poem with “I haven’t spoken to my mom in weeks.” Thus, Mother’s Day becomes every day.

The image of the bird — both constricted and free — flits throughout this book: a goldfinch, sparrows, angelic herons, “the grey cockatiel” in its cage, a “wired golden bird,” and “birds’ sleeping tears.” This last image, from “the largest possible quantity of anything is a lifetime,” where the speaker notes how moths will feed off a bird’s tears, and continues with clarity,

                                              We are 
        filled & yet float on the tears of others.
        In this lifetime, I too have drawn shares
        and scavenged from the sorrows
        of others for my own pale-nighted wings.

The poems in this collection are tender, honest, and graceful. Like the speaker’s daughter who stares at her with “solemn / weighing eyes,” My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties is large in what it encompasses, in its voice, and in its compassion. Elizabeth Sylvia insists that our lives are full of “great things even in their commonness.”

My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties by Elizabeth Sylvia. Ballerini Book Press, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jennifer Martelli is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree and The Queen of Queens, both longlisted by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER.

Book Review :: An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch

An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Historian of education Diane Ravitch was once a prolific writer and speaker on the U.S. right. As a fervent opponent of feminism and other contemporary social movements, she spent more than three decades championing education reforms that included charter schools, vouchers, and rigorous standardized testing. These positions not only won her plaudits from conservative leaders and think tanks, but also led to high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and hobnobbing with the powerful.

Over time, however, skepticism began to seep in and Ravitch began to question her long-held beliefs. “I saw that the toxic policy of federally mandated high-stakes testing was inflicting harm on students and teachers by establishing unattainable goals and demonizing public schools,” she writes in An Education. She also began to recognize the class and racial bias endemic to standardized testing, noting that high scores typically reflect access to wealth and privilege rather than intelligence or the ability to learn. Moreover, she saw that schools were failing to achieve their mission. “The experience of schooling should prepare young people to live and work with others in a democratic society and to contribute to the improvement of that society. Schools should encourage students to be the best they can be, not to be standardized into a preset mold.”

But they are not doing this.

An Education, part memoir and part analysis of failed state and federal reforms, takes contemporary policy makers to task for this failure. Honest, forthright, and wise, it’s an inside glimpse into the machinations of power from someone who has seen how ideas are used, manipulated, and sold to the public. It’s an important and insightful contribution to the field of educational policy and a passionate defense of public education.

An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch. Columbia University 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 :: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Book Eaters, Carolina Hotchandani presents poignant self-portraits as “a daughter,” “a mother,” and “a maker,” exploring themes of consumption, nourishment, and absorption. Across three impactful sections, the poet navigates her compelling “need to write / about my home, my ailing parents.” In her lyric poems, Hotchandani confronts her father’s language loss and impending death while grappling with her mother’s cancer diagnosis, all interwoven with the joys and trials of motherhood.

Hotchandani examines the complexities of her identity, shaped by her Brazilian mother and Indian father, and her experiences of giving birth to a daughter and writing poetry. Explicit in her exploration is the significance of Partition, representing not only a historical moment but also the emotional fragmentation echoing through generations. This duality of identity emerges incisively in Hotchandani’s roles as mother and writer, encapsulated in the lines: “As the baby drinks from my body my / milk, I edit my manuscript.” These words suggest that as the infant seeks nourishment, the mother-writer simultaneously seeks sustenance in ideas.

The poems vividly illustrate the interplay between losing and acquiring language, revealing how these experiences affect one’s sense of belonging — to oneself, family, and cultural heritage. In striking contrast, Hotchandani evokes imagery of insects infesting books against her father’s relentless hunger for fruit, symbolizing a haunting cycle of life and decay. “Satiation depends on the memory / of eating” encapsulates the insatiable nature of loss in the face of physical existence. Through these metaphors, Hotchandani also illustrates the struggles of motherhood and the weighty expectations imposed on women, raising questions about the gendered division of labor: How can a mother nourish herself while caring for another?

Ultimately, The Book Eaters artfully intertwines language, memory, and hunger, illuminating universal experiences of longing and loss in a debut that is “a love story, a bildungsroman,” and a book “to greet the real world.”

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani. Perugia Press, September 2023.

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

Book Review :: The Names by Florence Knapp

The Names by Florence Knapp book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

It’s difficult to believe that The Names is Florence Knapp’s debut novel, as she easily handles three storylines, fully developing characters who are similar in each one. The novel begins with Cora going to register her new son’s name, walking with her nine-year-old-daughter Maia. In one of the three plots that follow, Cora listens to her daughter and names her son Bear. In the second, she selects Julian, while in the third, she follows her husband’s demand and names her son after his father, Gordon. Each choice affects the path they all take from that point forward, which Knapp updates every seven years, moving from 1987 to 2022.

In all three storylines, Cora’s husband is physically and emotionally abusive, which means that her decision about the name has an outsized effect. Knapp’s characterization of Cora’s rebellion or acquiescence to her husband, depending on the storyline, is one of the strengths of the novel, as all of her actions are understandable, given how women react in radically different ways in such a horrific situation. The one constant throughout is her devotion to her children, even when that looks radically different in each storyline.

What truly elevates this novel beyond what could be a gimmicky premise is that Knapp doesn’t fall back on easy plotting. If, in one storyline, Cora is able to leave her husband and try to create a different life for her children, the remainder of the story doesn’t guarantee an easy life for her or her children. Instead, each variation has complications and rewards, just as a life does for most people.

While the focus of the novel is on Bear, Julian, or Gordon (his names are the chapter titles for each seven-year increment), Cora is the backbone of the novel, helping to shape Maia and Bear into the people they become. Maia also gets to live a full life, as she questions her sexual orientation and tries to develop meaningful relationships in more or less supportive communities. All of the character’s names matter — Knapp has even provided a type of glossary at the back to show what the names mean and/or why Knapp chose them — as Knapp explores how names do and don’t define us. She also wants to ask how and why pasts shape us. As in life, she doesn’t provide easy answers, but I definitely wanted to spend time with these characters to see how they managed the questions.

The Names by Florence Knapp. Pamela Dorman Books, 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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