Book Reviews by Title - O (44)
- Subtitle Seeing Nature in the Everyday
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- Book Type Nonfiction
- by Julia Corbett
- Publisher University of Nevada Press
- Date Published September 2018
- ISBN-13 978-1-943859-87-0
- Format Paperback
- Pages 232pp
- Price $17.95
- Review by Vivian Wagner
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday is a collection of essays by Julia Corbett that examines the false dichotomies between humans and nature, culture and wilderness. To break down these divisions, Corbett, a professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah, looks closely at “everyday nature”—the animals, plants, and objects in and around the cities and suburbs of America.
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- Book Type Fiction
- by Doug Ramspeck
- Publisher BkMk Press
- Date Published April 2018
- ISBN-13 978-1-943491-13-1
- Format Paperback
- Pages 184pp
- Price $15.95
- Review by Evgeniya Monico
When I think of fiction, I imagine literature that takes me far away from my own reality into other worlds. Anticipating Doug Ramspeck’s first fiction book The Owl That Carries Us Away, I almost envisioned a giant owl taking me to a brand-new world. To my surprise, however, I found myself, or rather lost myself, in worlds similar to my own. The familiar places and situations opened possibilities for me to relate to the characters and sympathize with them, while the carefully crafted language became the link offering connections to the author’s worlds.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Robert Fanning
- Publisher Salmon Poetry
- Date Published February 2017
- ISBN-13 978-1-910669-67-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 82pp
- Price $12.00
- Review by Natalie Tomlin
The word “museum” is usually associated with velvet ropes, alarms, roving guards. As Fanning introduces the word sudden into these carefully executed spaces filled with unfamiliar objects, he invites motion into a static world, redrawing the boundaries of artifact and observation. Though Our Sudden Museum is dedicated to the memory of his father, sister, and brother, and is filled with funny and painfully wrought elegies, unforeseen death reverberates his attention into new, unexpected places. Ultimately, with a broad range of forms and tones, Fanning ushers us into an elevated, enlightened space only reached through profound grief. Fanning's delivery is charged with urgency and grace, since at any moment, the mundane or cherished could be taken away, suspended under glass.
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- Book Type Anthology Edited
- by Jane Ormerod, Thomas Fucaloro, David Lawton, George Wallace, Aimee Herman, Mary McLaughlin Slechta
- Publisher great weather for MEDIA
- Date Published August 2017
- ISBN-13 978-0-9981440-2-3
- Format Paperback
- Pages 167pp
- Price $19.00
- Review by Valerie Wieland
I figure most people who read book reviews are also writers. So let’s dig right into David Lawton’s interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, featured in a new anthology called The Other Side of Violet. Harding endured rejections with his first novel, Tinkers, but five years later it was published by a literary press. He was teaching at the time and happened to look online to see who won the Pulitzer. “Honestly, I sort of half fainted—‘swooned’ would not be inaccurate—onto the floor of the crummy grad student apartment I was staying in. Totally surreal,” he says.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by J. Hope Stein
- Publisher Poet Republik Ltd.
- Date Published February 2017
- ISBN-13 978-0-9982666-1-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 37pp
- Price $15.00
- Review by Cheyanne Gustason
Picking up Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose for the first time, I was immediately surprised. The title alone is enough to catch the eye and make you wonder: What does it mean? How serious can this be? How literal?
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Matthew Rohrer
- Publisher Wave Books
- Date Published May 2017
- ISBN-13 978-1-940696-40-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 248pp
- Price $18.00
- Review by Kimberly Ann Priest
If you happened to glance at the number of pages in this manuscript (listed above) you’ll have noticed that it is much longer than your typical book of poems. In fact, The Others is not really a book of poems; it is a thick 4 x 7 paperback that looks very much like a typical novel. Amazon calls it a “gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse,” and that description seems about right.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Vi Khi Nao
- Publisher Nightboat Books
- Date Published May 2016
- ISBN-13 978-1-937658-48-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 80pp
- Price $15.95
- Review by Trena Machado
Vi Khi Nao, born in Long Khanh, Vietnam in 1979, came to the United States when she was seven years old. In her book, The Old Philosopher, she has given us poems in vigorous experimental language. Reading through the book the first time, there is a feeling of a balanced worldly eye, even as the pervasive indistinctness of mixed and matched images/metaphors leaves a sense of no orientation. By the third reading, the seemingly unmoored fragments begin to come into focus: the book feels like the interlacing of two cultures initiated by the wreckage of the Vietnam War.
- Subtitle A Pathological Biography
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- Book Type Nonfiction
- by John Sutherland
- Publisher Reaktion Books
- Date Published August 2016
- ISBN-13 978-1-78023-648-3
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 264pp
- Price $25.00
- Review by Valerie Wieland
British academic and writer John Sutherland lost his sense of smell three years ago during hay fever season. George Orwell (nee Eric Arthur Blair) apparently suffered from an acute sensitivity to smells, called nasal hyperaesthesia. Pair the two conditions, and Sutherland seized a new way of thinking about Orwell. He cites a quote from Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, which “contains the four words that have hung like an albatross around Orwell’s neck: ‘The working classes smell.’” From this was born Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, to be released this year.
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Michael Donhauser
- Translated From the German
- by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron
- Publisher Burning Deck
- Date Published 2016
- ISBN-13 978-1-936194-20-9
- Format Paperback
- Pages 128pp
- Price $14.00
- Review by Ryo Yamaguchi
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- Book Type Poetry
- by Rebecca Wolff
- Publisher Wave Books
- Date Published September 2015
- ISBN-13 9781940696133
- Format Paperback
- Pages 176pp
- Price $18.00
- Review by Benjamin Champagne