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Book Review :: (Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Education professor Soyoung Park’s latest book, (Re)Imagining Inclusions for Children of Color with Disabilities, is grounded in her direct observations of public, elementary-level “special education” programs in California, New York, and Texas. Throughout, she lambasts the general segregation and isolation of children into separate and unequal classrooms and offers a critique of the pervasive biases that label some children — especially those who are neither white nor English-dominant — as uneducable and inferior.

But the book’s strength is not in its unraveling of the link between ableism and racism. Rather, it rests with its focus on teachers who do the seemingly impossible: quiet aggressive, disinterested, and overwrought children. Park showcases how these master educators make room for unexpected actions and revelations; allow students to develop their unique intellectual curiosities; and center the development of relationships between teacher and student and between the students themselves.

Reading these anecdotal examples is revelatory — and inspiring — particularly because the book is being released as federal cutbacks to public education are looming. Nonetheless, thanks to the concrete examples that are presented, the text offers well-grounded insights into best practices for teaching kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. It’s an excellent model of what should happen in every special ed classroom.

At the same time, because the book never addresses the distinct needs of children who are deaf, blind, or severely intellectually impaired, it is not a one-size-fits-all reference. Still, teachers will learn a lot from the book and other readers will gain a profound appreciation of an often-denigrated profession.

(Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities by Soyoung Park. Harvard Education Press, March 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 :: Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The first two words of Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poetry, Heliotropia, are “I love.” The poet turns toward topics she deems “worth loving” — plant life, love life, and love poetry — like a sunflower moves in response to the sun. The collection’s strength and its risk are its “leaning into love.”

In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”

“I try not to be at war with memories
I teach myself that I can be my own divine agent
I practice surrender in the name of something I believe in”

Bandukwala’s poetry proactively cultivates intimate fellowship and appreciative practice. The poet knows her “path / is tenuous at best,” but makes a practice of “being alive” and determines “each day can hold one thing to love.”

In exploring “the subject / of love,” the poet acknowledges its dynamic, everchanging, and multifaceted nature. To illustrate that love is “constantly changing” and encompasses multiple definitions, the poet references poetry, painting, music, cinema, Star Trek, and The Marigold Tarot Deck. Her response to the perspectives of notable artists, such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, American poet Ellen Bass, and Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, contributes a unique framework for understanding types of love such as eros, philia, philautia, and agape.

Bandukwala writes from love and to love, believing that “even at its most difficult / love is worth loving.” Heliotropia celebrates her personal love of galaxies, stars, flowers, kisses, and language. For Manahil Bandukwala, “There are more love poems to write.”

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala. Brick Books, 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Upstate by Lindsay Turner

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The title of Lindsay Turner’s second collection of poetry, The Upstate, locates the poems and the reader in the northwesternmost area of South Carolina. For those unfamiliar with this region, the term “upstate” may evoke other meanings such as standing, lifted, constructed, ready. These adjectives suggest the complicated realities of geographic capitalism and resource exploitation prevalent in American landscapes. From references to “clearcut” forests to a “paper mill,” the haunting essence of the “land unanswerable beneath the haze—”

Despite hazy disorientation, Turner invites us to examine what is in our “peripherals.” As “a person who believes in the value of intelligence,” she dons a headlamp and attempts to “find the verb for how you lost” and articulates the destruction of a place and people that she witnesses. But Turner does not write “at a remove”; she is our accomplice. And we are hers, because the crisis is ours. “We all did it.”

“The question is who does your money come from
The question is whose loss
The question is whose loves are torn like wet paper for your money
Whose lines are crossed by it
Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable
Because of your money”

As Turner seeks orientation and perspective to “get at the truth of it,” she climbs “up a mountain” — another interpretation of “upstate”— and what she sees is devastating: “The only being on the rocky outcrop, some things present in their outlines while the others sink into the sea. The other things dissolve in toxic fog. The other things are sold in pieces so small you couldn’t recognize.” These days “heavy days,” struggling with what it means to live in a “bleak” state.

In The Upstate, Lindsay Turner “has a different song about being out of place.” A downstate. She sings to us, “Whose lives are rubbled,” acknowledging how “distanced” we are from “the garden.”

The Upstate by Lindsay Turner. The University of Chicago Press, October 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders

How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Chad Sanders lays out his premise in the opening line of the opening chapter of his book: “This is my last time writing about race,” a line that echoes Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Sanders takes a different approach to come to some similar and relevant conclusions, as he talks about the trades he has to make in order for (mostly) white executives to listen to him and greenlight his projects.

Sanders works in the entertainment industry, as well as in writing, and he spends a significant part of the book talking about the unpaid or underpaid work he has done in order to try to make the connections he needs in order to succeed. Much of that work involves talking about race, almost always including racial trauma. The parts of the book where he focuses on that part of his career mirror Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television, with its portrayal of a Black woman trying to break into television writing.

Sanders also draws on his experience in Silicon Valley, which is strikingly similar to Hollywood, as well as conflict within the African American community, such as the debate over the Jack and Jill organization. By the end of the work, he reiterates that this will be his last time writing about race. However, he admits, “Unless I need the money again,” as he recognizes the realities of the world, even while critiquing them.

How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders. Simon & Schuster, 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De'Ath book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

With Bernadette Mayer’s record-keeping poetry and Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto by her side, Amy De’Ath offers Not a Force of Nature. Each of these feminist writers resists “acting in the spirit of the contract” and seeks a “release from form” imposed by systems of power.

De’Ath writes at the intersection of feminism and capitalism, poetry and critique. Conscious of class, gender, sexuality, and other capitalist categories and oppressive systems, De’Ath writes against a “culture of financial bullshit” and attempts to make room for “Different shades of grey.” She “state[s] categorically that [she does] not endorse / whatever it is / people don’t like about these others—”

Readers will recognize categories of form such as a sonnet and an email, but what if “work emails” are made sonnets? That may seem like a simple question, but the implications are complex, suggesting not only a subversion of written forms, but a change in categorical concept. De’Ath proposes this “alternative trajectory” of tradition and conformity to the reader without coercion. As she considers “changeable forms of praxis,” De’Ath shifts readers away from being passive consumers of her art to being active thinkers within it. That’s art! And an act of love! “Since LOve tackles DEbt, [De’Ath] will follow it to / the marrow.”

At the core, Amy De’Ath is a revolutionary, writing against narrow cultural and institutional parameters. She refuses to conform to economic systems of artistic reproduction. Instead, she writes poetry to “make a concept out of it,” enabling socio-political thinking and heart-poetic communication. She writes for “People who like [her]… don’t want to reproduce / Themselves that way or this way.” Amy De’Ath’s way vies for people “roaming free” and a poetry “made by human hands.”

Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath. Futurepoem, Fall 2024.

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

Book Review :: Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff by Ali Smith book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The word gliff has a variety of definitions, one of which — now long since out of use — is “to make a slip in reading.” In that line, Ali Smith’s most recent novel seems a simple story, a dystopian tale about two children, Briar and Rose, who are unverifiables, people who are living off the grid, after their mother and (maybe) step-father go missing.

Along the way, they meet Colon (that seems to really be his name) who has a horse that Rose tries to buy, a horse she names Gliff. They also live with other unverifiables for a brief period of time. Smith never explains what has happened in the broader society to lead to whatever dystopian world now exists, but the monitoring certainly feels like something that could happen in any society today (there are also references throughout to Brave New World, though Smith isn’t concerned with the same questions Huxley was, as she’s writing about a different world than he could imagine).

It’s also never clear what Briar and Rose’s mother did that would lead to her being removed from the society or fleeing the society to avoid that removal, but Briar clearly doesn’t fit into the gender binary of this world. Smith doesn’t mention how they present their gender for much of the novel, but they ultimately encounter the world outside of their community of unverifiables, a situation that pushes Briar to choose one side of the binary.

The reader gets to see a bit of that world, as Briar has a good job a few years after having to make that choice. Ultimately, though, they encounter somebody else, somebody with news about Rose that reminds Briar who they once were and who they might still be. Though this novel seems to cover “a short space of time; a moment,” possibly only offering “a passing view; a glance, glimpse” of this world (other definitions for gliff), Smith clearly conveys the oppressive views of those who seek to impose their ideas — especially about gender and heteronormativity — on others, but she also reminds readers that there are ways to resist.

Gliff by Ali Smith. Pantheon 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Corner Office by Susan Hahn

Corner Office by Susan Hahn book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Susan Hahn’s Corner Office features the dramatis personae: Earth, Man, and Woman. Each character “pines” for what has been lost. For Earth, that’s “pastures” and “seasons.” For Man, it’s his corner office and the status it conferred. For Woman, who once had a corner office that was later “sliced in half, it’s more complicated.

It may be troubling to a feminist, but for a while in the unfolding drama, Woman “pines” for Man, “pray[ing] each night that he’ll change— / spin only around [her].” Eventually, Woman decides “not / to call him, or anyone, but to exist / not inside the clutter of others’ thoughts, / or corner offices and those who mourn them.” Phew!

Hahn presses her Man and Woman against the thin wall between gender stereotypes and archetypes, highlighting tensions between capitalism’s professional hierarchy and the patriarchy’s gender roles. His office furniture “bubble-wrapped,” Man soothes himself with the idea of having “seven different pairs / of breasts in one week—new moons / circling [his] face.” Man views women primarily as sexual objects, a “substitute” mother, or a therapist. That artistic choice carries ethical risks; stereotypical portrayals of men and women in society and art can perpetuate misogyny.

Hahn takes another artistic and ethical risk in having Earth speak in first person: “I cannot seem to stop / the injuries inflicted upon my surface.” While this utterance is moving, anthropomorphizing Earth risks reducing the planet to a vessel filled with human rationality. Early in the book, Earth asks, “How did it come to this?” A reader could argue that the human perception of Earth as a metonymic and metaphoric figure underlies climate crises.
Hahn’s Man and Earth lose power. But Hahn’s Woman emerges as the most nuanced, sympathetic character, ultimately finding freedom in the metaphorical “open field / of a poem.” The corner office is hers!

Corner Office by Susan Hahn. Word Poetry, April 2024.

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

Book Review :: The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

In The Infernal Machine, Steven Johnson tells a story of explosive political violence, boosted in the late 19th century by Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite (later dubbed “infernal machines” by the press), and culminating in the U.S. Red Scare arrests and deportations of 1919-20. While some of the actors are well-known to history, such as anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with their eventual persecutor, J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson also follows lesser-known creators and early adopters of modern policing techniques, like fingerprint analysis and bomb disposal, to combat the threat.

Following the destruction trail of dynamite, Johnson shows how Nobel’s invention was soon adapted by radicals opposed to oppression and the capitalist order. It featured increasingly in political violence from the high-profile assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, to the U.S. organized labor campaigns around the century’s turn, the intimidating blasts of the extortionist Black Hand in the aughts, and the prominent Italian anarchist bombing wave that swept the U.S. in 1919. Johnson weaves accounts of anarchist events from the writings of Goldman and Berkman with the creation of modern police surveillance techniques to provide an even-handed and satisfying account from both sides.

While some readers may bristle at the foundation of a surveillance state that continues to flourish, Johnson tactfully acknowledges these perils while providing the compelling reasons for its creation. Beginning his story in the Russian “old country,” Johnson returns there after Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other leading “alien anarchists” are deported in December 1919 to revolutionary Russia and its nascent civil war. However, the U.S. revolutions in both political violence and state control would continue to shape our future.

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson. Crown, May 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online journal of poetry and poetics, focusing on chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Adroit Journal, Jacket2, The Rumpus and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

“Did you check the box?” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks while celebrating a new granddaughter in the preface to his latest book. The pleasure he derives from his son-in-law’s having checked the Black box on the newborn girl’s birth certificate feels bittersweet, though. As a “race man,” he wants the girl to take pride in the heritage of Black America; one in which he’s played a significant role in sharing. Still, he also knows she’s now in a more insidious box, despite her 87.5% European ancestry, containing the fraught baggage of Black American history.

Drawing from his Intro to African American Studies course at Harvard, Gates delivers a real education in The Black Box: Writing the Race. While it provides an excellent overview of Black American thought from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. De Bois to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Gates goes deeper than how things have appeared to outsiders. He guides readers through different ways Black writers have approached escaping from the negative aspects of the box with strong, sometimes conflicting, convictions.

The Black Box shows that “Black thought” has never been unified or unchallenged, a fact that’s unlikely to change. By understanding the different ways Black writers and thinkers have conceived of their own identities, however, we can better understand how to overcome the racial challenges our society still faces, including in our literature. Maybe understanding and compassion can help smooth the sharp edges of the box.

The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Penguin Press, March 2024. Paperback release March 2025.

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, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.

Book Review :: Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Longtime activist and community organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel, founder and former executive director of the Groundswell Fund, a foundation dedicated to supporting grassroots, women of color-led organizations, has written an extraordinary book that merges memoir with matter-of-fact advice for advancing social change.

She begins by situating herself as the biracial daughter of a Sri Lankan father and white mother and describes what happened after she told her paternal family about being sexually abused by a relative. The family’s refusal to believe Vanessa caused her mom to flee; she ultimately opted to raise her only child in the mostly-white Pacific Northwest. The move caused a deep rupture for Vanessa, separating her from a Sri Lankan community that she had previously loved. Moreover, this foundational disruption has continued to indirectly impact her work as a progressive change agent and parent.

But other factors have also affected her, and the book offers a deconstruction of the ways she – indeed, all people – internalize racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, “isms” that can support or stymie community organizing. Concrete examples highlight the ways groups can be destroyed from within by allegations that a leader of color is “acting white” if they demand punctuality, good grammar, and productivity. While this may be seen as a public airing of dirty laundry, by calling out the deleterious impact these assertions have on targeted people, Unrig the Game provides a courageous interrogation of organizational implosions. It also provides a direct pathway out of destructive behavior, showcasing the experiences of several women of color who, like Daniel, have had their authority challenged and character derided.

Unrig the Game is a celebration of collaboration over competition and a wise analysis of the ways personal and political power, mental illness, and “cancel culture” intersect. This makes the book essential reading for everyone who works for, or with, feminist, queer, antiracist, and pro-democracy organizations.

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel. Random House, March 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 Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, is a long essay, more of a meditation on the serviceberry than an argument. Honestly, though, it is not even about the serviceberry, as she uses that as a means to talk about, as her subtitle puts it, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. However, her book is about much more than that, as she spends a substantial amount of time talking about gift economies and what that would look like in the twenty-first century world.

Kimmerer looks around the world as it currently is and finds a number of those types of gift economies already in existence. For example, in one section of the book, she uses quick examples of people taking somebody out to dinner or passing a stroller on to somebody else who needs it or another person who makes too much lasagna and shares it with a neighbor. In fact, Kimmerer often gets her serviceberries from a neighbor who grows and sells them, as that neighbor allows people to come and pick them for free.

She also uses larger examples, such as libraries and public roads or Scandinavian countries with a much higher tax base, but a much higher happiness index score, as well. Kimmerer pulls from her Indigenous roots and examines how various tribes have dealt with land management, including agreements to share lands between nations, recognizing that all benefit from the resources, so all should help care for them.

In a time where polarization seems not only to be the norm, but also to be widening in the United States (and a number of other countries around the world), a problem only reinforced by the widening wealth gap, Kimmerer reminds readers that there are other ways to be in the world. Not only that, she reminds us that those ways already exist, if only we take the time to notice them.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Scribner, November 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 :: Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Carver’s debut collection of poems, draws heavily from his life growing up gay in rural Kentucky, as well as his years as a high school teacher (where he had great success, leading to his being named Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2022). Not surprisingly, then, part of this collection focuses on the struggles he faced, especially within the education system as somebody who was openly gay in a red state.

However, Carver also talks about the love he received from his parents and others in his community, especially some of his teachers, ultimately leading to his relationship with and marriage to Josh, his current husband. In “Someday Child,” for example, when he was younger, he and his father were watching an episode of Jerry Springer, an episode that focused on a gay son coming out to an unaccepting father. His father comments, “You know, if I ever had a kid who felt comfortable telling me something like that, I hope they’d / know that it would be okay with me.” Carver’s not yet comfortable making that confession to his father, so he replies, “Well if you ever have a kid like that, I hope they do.”

This collection, though, is as much about class as it is about sexuality, as Carver also faced rejection because of where he came from. In “Hard to Take Seriously,” Carver tells of travelling to a state competition in speech and debate where he believes he performs amazingly. One judge, however, only provides the comment, “Hard to take seriously with your accent.”

Thus, Carver ends up struggling to find a place to fit in the world. Within the red state, people condemn his sexuality. In the wider world, they judge his socioeconomic status and cultural background.

However, in the final poem, “The Truth Will Stand When the World’s on Fire,” Carver shows how he has reconciled who he is with where he’s from and who he loves, largely based on the acceptance of those closest to him. It is a poem that draws from apocalyptic imagery, much like the book of Revelation; the revelation that he is true to himself and to all that has made him who he is, a reconciliation of both worlds.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, June 2023.

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

Book Review :: Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories from Two Lines Press book cover image

Two Line Press’ Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories brings together five previously untranslated peers of Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe in an exceptionally curated anthology of short fiction. While never explicitly stated, these are horror stories. Although their focus is never similar, enough themes and ideas are shared across all stories that it is hard to decide whether these are five isolated stories or equal parts of a homogenous universe.

Four of the five authors are women, the other queer, and gendered institutions form the bedrock through which strangeness grows. In one story, a wife’s simple hopes of going to the opera are complicated by her husband’s dimensions (he can fit in the box of a large sake bottle) and her mother-in-law’s connection to an ancient dwarf tribe. Elsewhere, a woman is so terrified by her husband’s annual departures that she obsessively buys new locks and mutilates herself — “radical cosmetic treatment” — in a way in which she hopes will keep him interested when he returns.

This is an amorphous collection, in which the only certainty is chaos. Age, size, gender and sexuality are in flux, and these characters — who seem to be contorting more than acting on their will — are archetypal protagonists of weird fiction.

Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories, authors: Nobuko Takagi, trans. Philip Price; Tomoko Yoshida, trans. Margaret Mitsutani; Jeffrey Angles, trans. Jeffrey Angles; Takako Takahashi, trans. Brian Bergstrom; Taeko Kono, trans. Lucy North. Two Lines Press, Center for the Art of Translation, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a writer based in Norfolk, England.

Book Review :: Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

From earliest childhood, memoirist Marty Ross-Dolen, a now-retired child psychiatrist, knew that her mother’s life had been marked by something she could only glimpse, but which manifested as a sadness and sense of loss that nothing could fix. As she came of age, she learned the reason: her mother, Patricia [called Patsy] the second of five children, had been orphaned in 1960 when she was fourteen. A plane carrying her parents – the executives at Highlights for Children Magazine – had been flying to a meeting in New York City to discuss expanded newsstand placement when a collision between their commercial jet and another plane left no survivors. This abrupt end to life as she knew it catapulted Patsy and her siblings from their midwestern home into the home of relatives in Texas. Although they were well cared for and well-treated, from that moment on, a gaping absence hovered over every aspect of Patsy’s life.

Likewise for daughter Marty, who feared upsetting her mom by asking too many questions about the people whose photos stared at her from the living room mantlepiece. Still, she wanted to know more about her maternal lineage, so she started digging. The result, Always There, Always Gone, involved fourteen years of research, including the perusal of thousands of letters – miraculously saved by family and Highlights archivists – between Ross-Dolan’s grandmother, Mary Martin Myers, and her business associates and relatives before her death at age thirty-eight.

The result is a genre-bending memoir, offering readers fragments that Ross-Dolan calls “wisps,” a blend of conventional narrative, erasure poetry, imagined conversations between her and her grandmother, and family photographs. Moving, if somewhat enigmatic, the memoir is an emotionally rich interrogation of the legacy of grief on people who are both directly and indirectly impacted by tragedy. A wise and thoughtful addition to our understanding of the long-term effects of trauma and its transmission from parent to child.

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen. She Writes 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 :: Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Danusha Laméris displays her skill for sensual poetics in this latest collection, Blade by Blade from Copper Canyon Press. The book’s naturalist bent is apparent from poem titles like “Okra,” “Praying Mantis,” and “Let Rain Be Rain.” It’s in thoughts of this natural world that the poet has taken refuge from the grief of losing both a brother and a son. As the speaker of “Slither” says, Laméris wants to “go back into the green, green world” of her youth, when she was “small as the curve / of a spoon,” and she invites readers along with her to “start over / leaf by leaf, blade by beckoning blade.”

Laméris may miss this world, but she has no illusions about its sometimes brutal nature. As the speaker of “The Cows of Love Creek” proclaims, alluding to the circle of life, “We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.” There’s bittersweet longing in many of these poems, with the natural world linked with the emotional through techniques like the double entendre in the poem, “(R)egret,” which begins simply with, “I see the word egret, but read, instead, / regret.”

While Laméris delivers a fine collection of poems with long, lush lines, there’s a distracting tendency to stray into cliche, seen even in poem titles like, “They Say the Heart Wants.” Though not every poem hit its mark for me, the poet’s skillful lines employing deft alliteration and assonance make the collection a pleasant read overall. Readers looking for an accessible, but meaningful poetry will enjoy this.

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris. Copper Canyon Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online literary magazine dedicated to poetry chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published by The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, On the Seawall, and Fugue, among others venues.

Book Review :: Joyride by Ellen Meister

JoyRide by Ellen Meister book cover image

Review by Elizabeth S. Wolf

Joyride by Ellen Meister invites readers to travel along as Joybird Martin embarks on her dream of becoming a life coach — from the driver’s seat of her humble blue Honda Accord. Despite a challenging upbringing and an array of insecurities, Joybird is a determined optimist, seeing the glass always brimming: “It’s a choice. I make that decision every day.”

There were times I wanted to reach into the story and shake that young woman by the shoulders for putting the needs of others ahead of her own and for some questionable choices, particularly regarding her love life. I was that invested. Also, I was occasionally annoyed at her brittle, sarcastic father. There’s some mystery around why the father’s career is in desperate straits, although I can surely guess.

Meister is skilled in advancing plot and developing characters through dialogue. With unexpected challenges or new clients, Joybird needed only a few centering breaths to find her way to empathy. Navigating plenty of intergenerational, romantic, and New York City caste conflict, Joybird journeys towards a future as bright “as the sun rising resplendently over a seedy New York City impound lot.” A fun read about the power of attitude and choices.

Joyride by Ellen Meister. Montlake, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: 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 Prize winner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.

Book Review :: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is set in ancient Greece, fifth-century Syracuse, to be exact. The Syracusans have recently defeated the Athenians in battle, a surprise to both sides, and they are keeping their prisoners of war in a quarry until they die. Lampo and Gelon are unemployed Syracusan potters, so they use their free time to visit the quarry to see which, if any, Athenians know any of Euripides’ plays, given Gelon’s love of theatre. That interest ultimately leads to their putting on a production of both Medea and The Trojan Women in one afternoon.

Lampo and Gelon, as well as the narrator, don’t sound like they live in ancient Greece, though; they sound like they live in twenty-first Ireland, more or less. Lennon, though, doesn’t play that approach for laughs. He simply uses contemporary language and voice to delve into the life of Lampo — the center of attention — as he tries to understand who he is. Gelon is the one who loves theatre and comes up with the idea to visit the Athenians, while Lampo simply goes along with his friend. Along the way, though, he has to make choices that will define the rest of his life.

It would be easy to say that this novel is about the power of art — Gelon at one point says, “It’s poetry we’re doing. It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.” — but the novel is about more than that, as any good art is. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and hatred and love and mistakes. In other words, it’s about humanity, whether in ancient Greece or contemporary Ireland. The struggles and successes are the same, no matter the time or place.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Henry Holt and Company, March 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 :: Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Though Susanne Dyckman’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s collaborative poetry collection Rendered Paradise “offers no route” to the poets’ compositional method, the experience of reading the collection prompts consideration of what constitutes collaboration. True artistic collaboration occurs when the combined result exceeds the sum of its parts, creating a third entity that, to borrow phrases from the poems, “assures its own fidelity” to a “truer / form of two,” one that is “sublimely unemphatic.” The emphasis and spirit of Rendered Paradise is on “Voices conjoined” in an “intimacy” of seeing.

Rendered Paradise “tells” the poets’ “story of looking” inspired by artists Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The collection is divided into three sections, each devoted to looking at, responding to, and highlighting the artists’ subject matter and aesthetic. Poems inspired by Vivian Maier’s artworks emphasize portrait and gesture. Those responding to Agnes Martin explore color, shape, and pattern. Poems influenced by Kiki Smith’s artworks incorporate themes of animals, reptiles, and the cosmos. The poems “model” a language of active looking regardless of the subject-artist or the poet-speaker.

Collectively, they are “Who see it all.” The poems sometimes convey the perspective of one of the poets, and at other times reflect the viewpoints of the artists. The reader is left uncertain of who “I” or “you” refers to within the poems. This “gesture beyond its own climate” suggests the poets’ intention to transcend the “dispute” over the “proximity of the pronoun.” As one poem describes, “Where / voice stops explaining patterns, it begins to have a body.”

With both collaborative method and “Identity pushed aside,” Dyckman’s and Robinson’s ekphrastic poems are “assemblage bound” and stand “for the mixing,” writing toward a “release” of pride in the seer and attachment to the seen/scene. Rendered Paradise is an exaltation of pure seeing.

Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson. Apogee Press, April 2024.

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

Book Review :: Close to Home by Michael Magee

Close to Home by Michael Magee book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sean is a young man in Belfast, Ireland, who spends most of his time drinking or doing drugs, seemingly not making any progress in life. He and one of his best friends, Ryan, live in an apartment that they’re about to be evicted from, as their landlord ran away, and it has black mold growing in it, as well. They both work as bartenders to try to make some money, but they’ve been barred from most of the places they try to go and drink due to their behavior. In fact, the novel opens with Sean about to go to court for punching somebody at a house party, causing serious harm to the young man’s face and mouth.

However, life wasn’t supposed to go this way for Sean, as he was different than his friends. He left Belfast and went to Liverpool, where he attended university and received a degree in English. He wanted to be a writer.

He has long odds to overcome, though, as his family has fallen apart. His mother left his father when Sean was young, and it’s clear that the lack of a father has wrecked Sean. He spends part of his free time looking his father online, as well as his half-sister from his father’s new marriage. Both of Sean’s brothers behave as recklessly as he does, prompting his mother to be surprised that it’s Sean who ends up going to court due to violence. They may have learned that violence from the IRA members they grew up around.

The one bit of light in Sean’s life is Mairéad, a young woman Sean grew up with. She was as violent and out of control as Sean and his friends, but she has changed her life. She spends much of the novel preparing to move to Berlin to try to break into the world of independent filmmaking. The problem is Sean makes the same mistakes again and again. Magee raises the question of how much environment shapes people and how one can love friends and family who might be preventing one from growing. There aren’t easy answers, but the reader continues to hope Sean can figure his life out.

Close to Home by Michael Magee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2023.

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

Book Review :: gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion

Gutter Rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

As the title gutter rainbows implies, “grit” and “glitter” coexist in Melissa Eleftherion’s third poetry collection. “Double consciousness” is also a characteristic of the poems’ speaker: “Before [she] understood the war of misogyny / [she] battled [her] own blood for understanding.” The poems also double in their artistic purpose, offering the poet “an attempt to / convene with the memory of the / interruption” while offering the reader “the story of [a girl’s] formation.”

The collection opens with Eleftherion’s portrayal of a “defiant,” self-possessed girl, navigating life between her own “kindling” and the challenging, often dangerous interactions with men. Eleftherion’s girl was “taught to hold space for the lion / sit quiet at his table” and to endure the “street mouths” as she walks “the avenue of eyeballs.” The poems highlight how these power dynamics and threats “damage” the girl’s sense of self-worth, leading to “internalized hatred” and “misogyny.”

As Eleftherion explores how the male gaze and patriarchal expectations “fracture” a girl’s life, she draws comparisons with how a geological depression interrupts a landform. Fracture variously appears in the poems as “gutter,” “gash,” “crack,” “ditch,” “pit,” “trench,” but in each case describes the shape of a landform that is lower in elevation than the surrounding area. This metaphor provides a visual and visceral vocabulary for experiences of trauma and the challenges faced by girls “fighting to be seen beneath” “a line of semen.”

Dear Sister Reader, “her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect.” Along with Eleftherion, we “hover as transformation / in the interstices / warrior, queen.”

So too, the transformation of trauma into poetry. Melissa Eleftherion’s gutter rainbows constructs a “lyric from the detritus.” While the poems explore themes of faults and fractures, they simultaneously reach “up up,” embodying true feminist resilience.

gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion. Querencia 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, might lead readers to think that he is the center of the book, especially with a focus on the various ways he feels pulled in two different directions. That latter part is true, but the true center of the book is Ba Má, his parents. He describes how they fled from North to South Vietnam, then to the United States. While Nguyen was alive during that time, he was too young to have many memories. He also talks about how hard his parents worked owning and running a grocery store, helping to provide for him and his brother.

However, Nguyen also talks about how he began to pull away from his parents, while also celebrating them in this book. Like many refugees and immigrants who come to America (or, as Nguyen describes it, AMERICATM), he loses much of his language and culture, partly because he wants to be more American, but partly because the culture that surrounds him shapes him differently than it does his parents, who spend much of their time at work.

That culture leads to a serious fracture in how Nguyen sees himself and the world, especially the various portrayals of Vietnam in the culture of his childhood. He talks about watching movies, such as Apocalypse Now and Rambo II: First Blood, seeing actors from other Asian countries play Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. However, he also digs deeper into the idea of colonizer and colonized, showing that people from North Vietnam, like his parents, took land from the Montagnards, an Indigenous group in the Central Highlands of the country.

One question he continually returns to is what has made him (and other refugees) who he is: is that because he is a refugee and Vietnamese or because of his family and his personal traumas. His book explores both of those poles without trying to reconcile them, as if there is any way they could be reconciled.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press, October 2023.

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

Book Review :: Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s latest work, Behind You is the Sea, is a series of interlocking stories that follow several Palestinian American families through their lives in Baltimore. While they all know each other well, their relationships both between families and within families are often strained, sometimes due to differences in class, but often because of a moral judgment one makes against another.

For example, the opening story centers on Reema Baladi, a young woman pregnant with her first child. She’s been seeing Torrey, but now that she’s pregnant, he is less interested in her. She compares herself to Amal, who is also pregnant, but who is planning to have an abortion, a decision that has made her an outcast in the community, including her family, as her parents have kicked her out of the house.

The collection ends with a story focused on Marcus Salameh, Amal’s brother. Their father has died, and Marcus has to take the body back to Palestine to bury him there. He discovers that their father had been supporting a woman named Rita, whom the Israelis had imprisoned and raped, leading to the community’s subtly ostracizing her—she’s invited to funerals, but not to weddings, for example. Marcus is confused as to how his father could reconcile supporting Rita, while banishing Amal, his own daughter.

The stories in between explore other relationships that are severed or strained, but also those that reconnect and grow. While some families break apart, other relationships develop and strengthen. There are stories that deal with domestic violence and eating disorders, but also those that reveal characters who discover the ability to love and forgive. As Marcus reflects in the final story, “The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.” Through all of their suffering, these are characters who cherish life, even when, like all of us, they do so inconsistently and imperfectly.

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj. HarperVia, 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 :: Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Through the poems in their debut chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, Koss “face[s] the world so raw and open,” endeavoring to address a traumatic past and to make “some beautiful things.” Accomplishing this entails “filling in the blanks” between the “sticky” memories of childhood “horror and experience” and taking “the liberties one / can take when” “art is conceived.”

The poet, “dancing [their] pen between” the verse line and the prose sentence, offers poems from the perspective of adulthood, looking “backwards” at the flawed adults who abused and abandoned them. Because the poems move between past and present selves, the writing is “in flux between connections and short circuits.” And, at turns, a “Cry or curse” infused with purpose: To name the “opt-out mother” and a father who “left when [they] were six”; To admit being “a victim more than once”; To grieve the death of a lover by suicide; To face the delusions of friendship and therapy. The writing also contains a “picture [of] tomorrow” in which coming to terms performs the magical act of making the trauma “go away.”

Unfortunately, it does not work that way. “There is no winning.” But trying to “be honest now” “ease[s] the pretending” and enables the poet/person to “become who they are.” Whether identifying as “craggy boxing bitch,” lesbian, “one-speed train,” or “withdrawn and frequently tired,” the poet is “a bit at odds with” self but is determined to “just feel what [they] feel.” To a survivor of abuse and oppression, the felt expression is the ultimate liberty and triumph.

These poems are “proof of… dysfunction,” but they also prove the function of art as a “salve” for what we “see / and don’t.” Whether engaging with self through trauma, queerness, psychology, or art, Koss approaches the page “with an open sense of wonder.”

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-activist Viet Thanh Nguyen was asked to deliver Harvard’s annual Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 2023, he admits that he was intimidated. After all, a string of luminaries had preceded him – Leonard Bernstein, Nadine Gordimer, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Igor Stavinsky, and Wim Wenders, among them – but in accepting the honor, he agreed to probe what it means to write as an “other.”

To begin, he had to face his otherness as an amalgam: On one hand, he’s an outsider because of his race (Vietnamese) and working-class, refugee background. But he’s also an insider because of his occupation (English professor at USC) and current social standing (MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowship recipient).

Furthermore, Nguyen understands that his privilege is not representative of other “others.” Nonetheless, he defines otherness as encompassing all who are “out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves.” This, he writes, includes “the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed.”

That is, pretty much everyone aside from white, ruling-class males.

The essays in To Save and To Destroy move seamlessly between the personal and the political, and while Nguyen presents a plethora of sometimes-obtuse literary references, he expresses heartfelt solidarity with refugees and those in exile. While he contests their categorization as voiceless – he believes everyone has a voice, even if it’s ignored – he is unfailingly sympathetic to individual struggles. Particularly moving is his account of displacement’s impact on mental health. In fact, by zeroing in on his mother’s psychiatric hospitalizations, the book provides a deeply-felt account of exile’s toll. It’s beautifully wrought.

Nguyen’s deepest wish is for humanity to move into “expansive political solidarity” for collective liberation. It’s an inspiring, if aspirational, vision.

To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Belknap Press, April 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 :: Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

The poems of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another form a “chromosomal / bridge of inheritance, progenitors resurrected.” Informed by his family’s lore, Lavender recounts the “crackling murmur” between generations while dispensing with categorical divisions between genre (poetry and memoir) and persona (poet and narrator).

Come One Thing Another is a collection of memoiristic poetry. Cory Lavender is the person recording the lives of his “Milk Father,” an uncle accidentally shot over the “fate of [his] heifer,” an aunt who survived the Depression, and a great grandmother with a bad temper, among others on his mother’s and father’s sides of the family.

The Roy and Lavender families are chock full of rebellious, tell-it-like-it-is characters with ties to Africa, Jamaica, Germany, and Nova Scotia. Lavender, the poet among them, writes idiomatically and colloquially, giving voice to and “capturing” his relatives’ “likenesses” in rangy poems that offer opinions on deer hunting, plastics pollution, lobster prices, and “Hard Times” that affect the way of life of his family, who farm and hunt the land in a “guns and grub” relationship that makes them intimately aware of change. “Nothing like it used to be.”

To “extend remembrance” is at the heart of what motivates Lavender to write his family story. The poet is also writing to address the “shadows” and “tangle” regarding his place in his family tree.

Necessarily, a few poems address the fact that he, like his father, “grew up unaware he’s mixed,” “half-ashamed of [his] signature curls.” In the poem “Fort Cory,” the most self-telling poem within the collection, the poet confesses feeling “embarrassed writing this.” Such are the personal and artistic pressures to measure up to the “hallowed coordinates” of the people he loves.

Despite being “Besieged by insecurities,” Cory Lavender walks his own “stretch of shore” in his “cobbled ode” and heartfelt memorial.

Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender. Gaspereau 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany

The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

When Oliver Michaels was elected to represent the people of Maine in Congress, he pledged to fight hard for working-class and low-income people. But as progressive bill after progressive bill is defeated, his fury is mounting and he is seriously considering leaving the prestigious body. In addition, he and his wife have separated and he is depressed and lonely.

It is at this point that New York Times reporter Alex Broussard, Michaels’ college girlfriend, contacts him about an anonymous tip she’s received about collusion between two Senators, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a corporate polluter. According to her source, the three individuals are embroiled in a pay-to-play scheme that has allowed industrial malfeasance to continue unchecked, with the dumping of tons of chemical waste into the waterway of a small, rural, Indiana town. Spiking cancer and respiratory illnesses in the area have concerned residents for decades, but it is not until Broussard and her colleagues begin investigating that the scope of the political scheme is uncovered. As the truth emerges, the culprits know they’re in trouble, but rather than come clean they concoct plans to retain their toehold on power.

It’s a tense and well-wrought setup that involves a slew of people – including mafia hitmen – and numerous federal agencies. While the latter work in tandem, suffice it to say that the novel has a happy ending, and anyone needing an infusion of progressive populism – as well as an example of a politician with humility, integrity, and grit – will get a hefty dose.

What’s more, The Senator is a good, old-fashioned story with characters you can root for. The satisfaction of seeing social justice prevail and a romance rekindled makes the novel an enjoyable, fun read. Highly recommended.

The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany. Rising Action Publishing Company, April 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 :: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital by Samantha Harvey book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Orbit, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel, has almost no plot, choosing a more meditative approach instead. Six astronauts and cosmonauts circle around the Earth sixteen times in the course of the day, living aboard the international space station. There is a different mission launching on that day, one that is going to the moon, implying the demise of the ISS, as humanity looks further out to space. The six reflect on that development, but most of the book is a meditation on Earth, not on space.

One of the two events that occurs in the course of the day is that one of the astronauts—Chie, from Japan—receives word that her mother has died. She has a few moments where she deals with that grief, but not much more. The other event is the build up of a typhoon on Earth, as the six take pictures of it, so meteorologists on Earth can see how it’s developing. It turns into a super-typhoon, wiping out parts of small islands, but Harvey shows little of that destruction.

Instead, there are chapters devoted to reflections on the beauty of the Earth, as well as its ordinariness. There are reflections on the absence of borders as seen from space, implying that national divisions are Earth-bound, human-created problems; however, the narrator also points out that all of the environmental changes they can observe from space are political problems, that the supposed constructs have real effects.

Harvey explores these types of tensions throughout the novel, not settling for traditional views of how humanity is nothing more than a speck in the cosmos. Instead, she writes, “We matter greatly and not at all.” The view from space reminds readers that the Earth is valuable and that we should do all we can to protect it, even though, in the broader view, it will ultimately get subsumed by some cosmic event. Orbital is a celebration of the beauty of life now, even while admitting what the future will bring.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove Press, December 2023. Winner of the Booker Prize 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 :: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Jayne Anne Phillips’ latest novel, Night Watch, is set in and around the Civil War, as sections take place in 1864 and 1874, with an epilogue in 1883. However, very little of the novel actually occurs in what most readers would think of as the Civil War. There’s only one battle scene, and there is little mention of slavery. Instead, Phillips is interested in the effects of the war, not just on those who fought in it, but on those whose lives are more peripheral to it.

The plot follows Eliza and her daughter ConaLee, as they try to survive while their husband and father, respectively—whose name the reader doesn’t learn until near the end of the novel—is away fighting. They live in rural West Virginia, so they have ConaLee’s grandmother (of sorts, it’s complicated), Dearbhla, living nearby to help, but they are largely isolated otherwise. A Confederate soldier appears in the 1864 section, but his real effect only shows up in the 1874 sections of the novel, as he has taken over the house and family, forcing them to refer to him as Papa. He ultimately has Eliza institutionalized in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, with ConaLee pretending to be her attendant.

The novel reminds the reader of the traumas that women endured, but also that they continue to endure, especially at the hands of men. Even in the best times of their life, Eliza and ConaLee are largely dependent on men and the decisions they make. Phillips shows the effect of that trauma—and the larger traumas of the war—through characters repeatedly having their names taken from them or having to change their names. At the asylum, for example, Eliza becomes Miss Janet, while ConaLee becomes Eliza Connolly; Eliza’s husband becomes John O’Shea for a time when he loses his memory of who he was. At one point in the novel, Phillips writes, “…the past is the present unrecognized.”

While Night Watch is clearly about the Civil War, it’s also about the lack of freedom and traumas women continue to endure, the present reality that so many are unable or unwilling to recognize.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023; Vintage, February 2025. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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 :: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

In her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls tries to understand and explain—though, most of all, feel—the intergenerational trauma she inherited from her grandmother, Sun Yi, and mother, Rose. She knows what she experienced as a child, as her grandmother suffered from a mental illness that left her obsessed with writing her story, unable to communicate otherwise, leading Rose not only to devote her energies to caring for Sun Yi, but also to overprotecting Tessa to prevent her from suffering the same fate.

Hulls spends much of the work using research to dig into Sun Yi’s life in China, showing how and why she had to flee during the Maoist revolution. Sun Yi was a journalist who became famous for writing a memoir about her time before she escaped China, fleeing to Hong Kong. However, the trauma of her repeated interrogations before she left the country leads to her mental illness, leaving her uncommunicative except for her constant writing, which becomes less and less intelligible as she ages.

Hulls also spends time talking to her mother, trying to understand how her mother coped with Sun Yi’s struggles, but also why Rose and Tessa were unable to communicate with each other. Hulls works to understand how Rose wanted emotional reactions from Tessa that she was unable to provide, leading Tessa to ultimately leave home as soon as she was able. In fact, she ends up living in Antarctica and Alaska, at various times, putting as much space between her and her mother as possible. A note to readers, as well: Tessa struggles with self-harm for a period of time, though she does not spend much time on that part of her life.

Hulls’ work on this book—ten years in the making—to face the ghosts that have haunted her family for three generations, is an attempt to work through the traumas rather than avoid them. The work is artistically and narratively dense, as Hulls has much to convey to help her and the reader understand the years of suffering, but that work is worth it for all involved. Readers will leave with a clearer understanding not just of Tessa and her family, but the effects that intergenerational trauma can have on those who have no first-hand knowledge of the suffering that began it all.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls. MCDxFSG Books, March 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 :: Clear by Carys Davies

Clear by Carys Davies book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Apart from the writing, very little in Carys Davies’s novel is actually clear, as she sets her story in two historical upheavals. First, there is the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, when roughly a third of the ministers rebelled against the system of patronage. Second, the Clearances led to landowners removing entire communities of the poor in rural areas from their homes, as they sought to profit from farming, raising cattle (then mainly sheep), a reshaping of the class and literal landscape that occurred from the mid-eighteenth century well into the nineteenth.

John Ferguson, the main character, finds himself caught in both of these significant changes, as he leaves the Scottish Church to become a member of the Free Church, which doesn’t yet have buildings or an infrastructure or means to pay ministers. Thus, he accepts a job that forces him to travel hundreds of miles to a remote island, one that Davies creates as existing somewhere between Shetland and Norway. He has to remove the one remaining inhabitant, Ivar, of that island for a landlord named Lowrie.

However, before he can present Ivar with a letter informing him of the removal, as John doesn’t speak his language, John falls and seriously injures himself, leading to Ivar’s nursing him back to health, unaware of John and his mission. They develop a deep friendship, as John works to learn Ivar’s language, and Ivar realizes how much he has missed community. While John is there, his wife Mary has begun a journey to bring him home, as she fears for his life, given what has happened to other messengers of such news.

Davies’s novel is brief, and the writing is spare and straightforward, beautiful because of that concision. While she sets her characters in an important historical time, her focus is on their relationships with one another, especially how language can bring people together, even when they can’t quite communicate. She reminds readers that true community is not one without conflict, but where one can develop their true selves, even when those don’t fit the expectations society has devised to keep people in line, especially during times of historic change.

Clear by Carys Davies. Scribner, April 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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The title of Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, might give the impression that the protagonist Charles’s life is on fire, and he needs to escape it. That would give Charles too much agency and too much urgency. However, it’s true that his life is not going well and has not been going well for quite some time.

There are two events that have left him estranged from those he cares about, as well as from himself. First, his mother holds him responsible for his step-father’s death, and he doesn’t seem inclined to correct that assumption. The reader is never clear on what happened, given that the story is from Charles’s vantage point, but the guilt Charles feels is real, as is the distance from his mother. He reconnects with her, but only as she’s losing her memory and her grasp of reality.

Second, he has a house across the river from where his daughter, Elizabeth, grew up with Mary and Roger. Mary is her mother, and Elizabeth knows Roger as her father, as they never told Elizabeth about Charles, her biological father. When Mary found out she was pregnant, she left Charles, as she wanted to raise Elizabeth as a Penobscot on the reservation, so Elizabeth needed a certain level of Indigenous blood. Charles is white, even though he grew up on the reservation with his mother and step-father, who was Penobscot.

Given that much of the novel relates Charles’s feeling stuck in his life, there’s not much of a plot propelling the story forward. Charles checks on his mother, watches Elizabeth from a distance, and spends time with his friend Bobby (who spends most of his time drinking, even though Charles is in AA). Charles spends much of that time considering taking an action that could change the lives of many of the people he knows. Like in most people’s lives, not much happens in Charles’s life, but characters develop, and life moves slowly forward until it lurches ahead, leaving people wondering where it’s gone.

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. Tin House, June 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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum

Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Dear Reader, the poems of Pine Soot Tendon Bone, Radha Marcum’s second full-length poetry collection and the winner of The Word Works’s Washington Prize, “sing harmonies / to complicate your discontent” with public health, gun violence, and ecological degradation—the evidence at the crime scene and the stratum of prolonged grief “forcing us all off / center” in our cacophonic contemporary lives.

“When the semi-automatic facts rushed in,” when we entered a “Plague Year,” when a valley is “plundered, then / plowed… [and] divided / into… clone homes,” we have need of a poet as attentive to “sorrow” as to “tenderness.” Radha Marcum is such a poet. She acknowledges “worry” at “the fate / of glacier lilies” and “recognize[s] / abundance when it is offered.”

By combining a lyric attention fine as “red silt” with an intellect as “sharp [as cholla cactus] spines,” Marcum is “alert in the juxtaposition.” Her poems “mother stillness / even as they shiver.”

Like a Japanese Sumi-e artist using black ink, made from “pine, soot, tendon, bone,” to make a painting on contrasting white paper, Marcum’s “ink-marks” are meditations on what “traverses merciless spaces” while “looking for … respite, too.”

When a “wildfire haze… / peppers the membranes of our eyes,” Marcum reminds us to hear the “air singing in the redwoods / whose seeds require / / a germinating fire.” By facing what is “irretrievable,” Radha Marcum’s poems also show us what “survived” “the dark / mulch of [our] days.” In Pine Soot Tendon Bone, it is “tenderness” that proves fire-resistant and transforming.

Pine Soot Tendon Bone by Radha Marcum. The Word Works, June 2024.

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

Book Review :: The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian

The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

The complex legacies of violence are central to Nancy Kricorian’s spare and poetic new novel, The Burning Heart of the World. The 15-year-long civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990) and its impact on a small Armenian Christian community in and around Beirut forms the backdrop of this searing tale. Fighting is ever-present.

Nonetheless, the conflict remains enigmatic, perhaps because the book’s narrator, Vera, is a teenage girl more interested in spending time with her friends than she is in understanding the nuances of politics. Still, near-constant bombings, blackouts, and shootings take a toll on Vera and her family, and as the conflict rages the adults decide that it is time to leave Lebanon – a move that necessitates parting from a beloved family member who’d survived the Armenian genocide in the early years of the 20th century. The impact of this upheaval is masterfully woven into Vera’s coming-of-age story, and the resultant separation from friends and family – coupled with the residue of having lived in a war zone – complicate Vera’s adjustment to her new life in the United States.

But this unfolds slowly. In fact, for many years Vera is seemingly fine. Then, decades after leaving her birthplace, on a clear, sunny September day in 2001, the Twin Towers fell, triggering Vera’s long-repressed memories of wartime Beirut. Kricorian’s account of Vera’s unraveling is evocative and powerful, unsentimental but hard-hitting. There is emotional nuance here, and many brief but perceptive observations.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War, The Burning Heart of the World is a beautiful, sad, and timely look at the aftermath of war and its lasting impact on survivors. Highly recommended.

The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian. Red Hen Press, April 2025. Pre-order is available.

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 Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, Michelle Adams book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Seventy years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision was issued, public schools in most of the United States remain as racially and economically segregated as they were in 1954. In fact, as legal scholar Michelle Adams writes in The Containment, “since 1990, segregation has increased in every part of the country…Not only that, the school districts that serve nonwhite children receive far less financial support than those that serve mainly white children.” The difference, she writes, amounts to $2226 less per child. As a result, schools in low-income neighborhoods – the lion’s share of them filled with children of color – are more dilapidated and have fewer resources than those in higher-income areas.

These inequities could have been rectified had the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley been different.

The Containment provides an exhaustive deconstruction of Milliken and focuses on the inexorable link between housing segregation and segregated schools. Furthermore, Adams convincingly argues that the only way to end “separate and unequal” education is to ensure that students of all races, religions, addresses, and creeds study together. Numerous plans — including busing and creating large, integrated K-12 Educational Parks — were presented in multiple trial iterations.

But SCOTUS scuttled these approaches, finding the plans invalid.

At issue was whether school segregation policies were deliberately developed or were unorchestrated. Despite reams of evidence documenting redlining and restrictive housing covenants, SCOTUS found that the city of Detroit – and by extension other locales – had not intentionally kept Black and White students apart.

The upshot? “Educational apartheid” for both Black and White kids. As Adams concludes, “the highest court in the land told the nation that suburban school district lines can be used as fences to exclude Blacks.” And most have done just that.

The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 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 :: Ojo en Celo by Margarita Pintado Burgos

Ojo en Celo by Margarita Pintado Burgos book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, adroitly translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho, is a meditation on vision, “Haunted by a slow want” to see the “glistening / from its own / beyond.”

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat opens “on the brink of drought” with a figure who “put[s] forth the idea of rain before” “see[ing] it rain” and who wishes to “Allow oneself to rain.” Pintado Burgos’s use of the infinitive as a subject suggests the position of the figure who is seeing. It is not the seer, but the seeing and the seen that takes precedence. This is “The mystery of form” whose “forms resemble / other forms” Pintado Burgos pulls “hard into the pupils” to confront “opacity” and “seek brightness.”

Pintado Burgos’s seeker is a woman, “walking, as if there were a clear path,” through exiled and sublime spaces, “earnestly examining the makeup of days.” She asks, “What is an event?”: “Does the woman who crosses the street holding her skirt down, fearing the wind, constitute an event?” And, by extension, the poet also examines the line between being a vision and having a vision.

“No one sees her coming, but she arrives.” In her poems, Pintado Burgos stands before “a body of water” as if “in front of sadness.” This “woman / who had come from so far away,” “persisted, separating… / the vision from the retina / to look at [her]self without mirrors / broken but whole.”

In Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat Margarita Pintado Burgos “contort[s] all of [her]self” and empties herself out like “the sky empties itself out” to confront “Writing as an ailment of surfaces” and illuminate an “expansion” of vision. Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat rains, reins, and reigns!

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat by Margarita Pintado Burgos, translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho. Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The University of Arizona Press, February 2024.

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

Book Review :: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

For those fans of Oliver Burkeman’s previous work Four Thousand Weeks, his latest book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, may feel a bit redundant. Burkeman’s overall argument is the same: we only have a limited amount of time on this planet, so, despite what those who try to craft “life hacks” preach, there aren’t any tricks to change that cold reality. Thus, instead of spending time and energy trying to work in a few more minutes here and there in the misguided belief that people have the ability to do everything, Burkeman contends that we should focus on using our limited time doing what we love and what gives our life meaning.

However, he has updated some of the research from his previous book, and he formats this one in a package that’s easier to access for those who are coming to his work for the first time. In Meditations for Mortals, he divides the book into four sections—Being Finite; Taking Action; Letting Go; Showing Up—for the four weeks he suggests readers devote to the book. Each section, then, has seven brief (usually around five or six pages) readings moving through each of those ideas. Readers can follow that plan, as I tried to do for about a fourth of the book, or read the book straight through in a few sittings, which is how I ended up finishing it, and the book works just as well either way.

Burkeman positions his book as a type of anti-self-help, as he doesn’t want to try to convince readers that they can make a few changes and their lives will be perfect. He knows how unreasonable and unattainable that approach is. Instead, he wants readers to see their limits, then make changes to live more enjoyable, meaningful lives. His argument is compelling, and he brings in a number of resources to help readers take those steps. He knows they’re not easy, but they can make change feel much more doable. As his subtitle says, he wants readers to embrace their limitations and make time for what counts.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith

Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Invisible Lives, Cristalle Smith writes “to offer / what [she] can” from the intergenerational trauma of her and her family’s lives which intersected with abuse of power and violence in the home, between intimate partners, and sexual abuse of children by adults. As the poet speaks from the “aching confusion” of her past, she breaks her family’s silence on these taboo subjects and those often cruelly adjacent such as poverty, homelessness, addiction, and suicide.

As Smith chronicles her life from a young girl to becoming a mother, she necessarily engages with gender — “When you’re a girl, you take things into you.” Memory, that “conduit / in between” experience and time, “lives in [her] body.” “It’s funny the things you remember.” And it is telling.

As she boldly shares what she remembers, Smith’s writing moves between the extension of the sentence and the brevity of the line, to get at the tensions between growing “up Always / on / the / run” and trying to “get the [life she] wished for.”

Moving from the prairies of Alberta to the Everglades of Florida with stints elsewhere in between, Smith’s restless writings chronicle lessons on how to drive and live along the way, transforming her traumatic past by singing the Blues of her survival.

Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith. University of Calgary Press, July 2024.

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

Book Review :: Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng

Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In her third full-length poetry collection, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, Jennifer Tseng includes the reader in an epistolary exchange between her and her father. Reading the lyric poems, constructed in part from letters written by Tseng’s father, is as intimate as reading over the poet’s shoulder.

The epistles/poems bring to the fore the “inherent dilemma” within human communication. Despite the impossible and the obdurate, the poems also reveal a humble striving for connection and understanding between parent and child. This parent and child reach toward each other through the challenges of speaking different languages—English and Mandarin—across oceans. Every letter is a “riddle,” “contradiction,” or a “code [they] sent back & forth.”

Tseng is, and therefore her readers are, situated both “Outside [her father’s] letters” and “inside” them, providing a near real-time experience of the poet rereading her father’s letters and writing back to him. “The letters’ spell: / What’s missing.” The poems then are part reconstruction of memory and completion of correspondence while always reaching “farther” for “father.”

In a book “of mourning,” Jennifer Tseng “sit[s] in her father’s Shanghai apartment & eat[s] / His letters.” She “swallows the underworld” of “regret,” digests incoherence, and arrives at a “Plush unity. / A father never ends.”

Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng. University of Massachusetts Press, April 2024.

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

Book Review :: Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby

Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby book cover image

Review by Aiden Hunt

Fans of literary criticism and poetry have likely heard the buzz surrounding poet-scholar Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, published by Seven Stories Press in November 2024. While I’m familiar with that feeling of disappointment when a hot new book just doesn’t live up to the hype, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book meeting, if not exceeding, the praise already being heaped upon it.

Ruby fills his epic poem about the history of poetry with plenty of footnotes—also presented as verse—explicating clever allusions to moments in the history of poetry and poetics through more detailed asides and famous quotes. With the exception of the prose prologue titled, “Razo” and the epilogue final section, “Tornada,” written in tercets, every other page contains footnotes on the right juxtaposed with one to twenty-nine lines of poetry on the preceding page, weaving text and subtext together in a feat that recalled to my mind Junot Diaz’s award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Readers uninterested in footnotes and looking up literary quotes in various languages including French, Mandarin, Latin, and Ancient Greek might find the book not to their tastes. However, while this poem may be a challenge to consume, Ruby’s witty, often cheeky allusions to linguistic history pay intellectual dividends for the effort. First thought, best thought: While the subject may be too specialized to interest all readers, Context Collapse is educational, entertaining, and edifying, particularly for poetry enthusiasts.

Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby. Seven Stories Press, November 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, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, On the Seawall, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among others.

Book Review :: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his most recent book, The Message, to a group of students enrolled in his writing class in 2022, calling them “comrades,” as he believes they all have an obligation to tell the truth through journalism. His first, brief essay—almost an introduction—provides his background and why he became interested in journalism, drawing on a Sports Illustrated story, as well as references to Shakespeare, Rakim, Audre Lorde, and Frederick Douglass. His father also helped point him in the direction of using research to understand important questions.

The rest of the book centers around three trips Coates took: to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. In Senegal, he visits places important in the sale of enslaved people, coming to understand that part of that story is myth—not the inhumanity, unfortunately, but the idea that there is a particular place that encapsulates all of that inhumanity, or that the inhumanity came only through colonization. He visits South Carolina to support a teacher who had allegedly violated a state law passed against teaching “critical race theory”; during a school board meeting he learns there are allies, as well as opponents.

The trip to Palestine is the longest section of the book, as Coates spends five days in Palestine for a literary festival and five days on the Israeli side. It is this section where Coates has his most dramatic epiphany, as he once compared the plight of the Israelis to formerly enslaved African Americans when he was making the argument for reparations. He sees, though, that Israel has now become an apartheid state, that those whom Germany once oppressed have now become the oppressor of others. Coates goes even further to show readers how Germany took the idea of race-based oppression from the United States and how Israel ultimately aligned themselves with South Africa.

Behind each of his trips, though, is the idea of what stories don’t get told. Whether that’s what he didn’t know about Senegal, what lawmakers in South Carolina were trying to keep students from learning, or how the media covers the oppression in Palestine—especially telling is that almost no major news outlet publishes work by people of Palestinian descent—Coates wants readers to dig deeper and find out what they’re not hearing.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, October 2024.

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

Book Review :: Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Colored Television by Danzy Senna book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Colored Television, Danzy Senna’s latest novel, follows Jane, an English professor working on her second novel—centered around the idea of the mulatto (Jane’s term; she is mixed-race)—for a decade. She now needs to complete that novel as her sabbatical is ending, and she needs the publication to earn tenure. She and her husband Lenny—an artist who only produces art he believes in, whether that earns him any money or not, and it’s more often not—along with their two children, have moved from one living situation to another over that time.

They begin this novel having moved into a fabulous house owned by Brett, one of Jane’s friends from graduate school, though Jane believes he has sold out by becoming a screenwriter and script doctor. Jane, however, begins to follow him down that path, as her novel draft, which she finally finishes, is a dead end, according to her publisher and agent. She emails Brett’s agent, who then puts her in touch with Hampton Ford, a television producer who is interested in producing diverse content.

Without telling Lenny, Jane begins meeting with Hampton to discuss a series that explores a family of mixed-race characters, much like Jane’s, in a sitcom setting. Jane is enamored of the life Brett has, and she consistently envisions her family living that life, as she believes she just needs one break to escape the supposed poverty she lives in.

While Senna is certainly exploring race in her novel, she equally critiques class, especially the greed that can drive one to ignore all that one already has in life, as Jane seeks to live a life that Lenny and the children have no interest in. While the ending of the novel is a bit pat, the questions that Senna raises are anything but.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna. Riverhead Books, September 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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Shahnaz Habib’s subtitle—An Irreverent History of Travel—is an apt description of her book, as she is, indeed, critical of what most people believe about travel and travel writing. For example, her opening chapter interrogates how guidebooks shape our views not only of where to go, but what to notice when we’re in those places, often leaving out the colonizing empires that lay behind those sites.

She discusses “passport privilege” in her second chapter, contrasting her experience trying to travel on an Indian passport with her husband, who has the much more desirable blue U.S. passport. She goes beyond that idea, though, to explore how passports began as a way of limiting travel, making it clear who gets in and who doesn’t.

In other chapters, she discusses railway systems and how the government and companies often took the land for the lines from Indigenous people groups, ignoring the treaties in the name of progress and tourism. She also explores nature and the outdoors, especially how many people groups—especially people of color—have a lack of access to those spaces.

Habib draws on her family and her hometown to examine why some towns begin to cater to tourists, while others, such as where her family moved, do not, as well as why some people love to travel, while others—like her father—do not. Rather than creating a clear dichotomy, though, she reminds readers that her father traveled through news and books, becoming more aware of the wider world than others who had visited countries across the globe.

Shahnaz Habib doesn’t merely want readers to question the benefits of tourism, as she’s a tourist herself, she admits. Instead, she wants to help them see behind the scenes of the entire idea of tourism, recognizing the people and cultures pushed to the margins, mainly so people with more coveted passports can believe they understand a world they haven’t yet begun to see.

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib. Catapult, December 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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: Playground by Richard Powers

Playground by Richard Powers book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The obvious playground in Richard Powers’ newest novel is an online platform Todd Keane developed, where users can submit comments people vote on for electronic currency, of sorts. He worked it out shortly after graduating college, which he attended with his best friend, Rafi Young, who wants to be a poet. The title also describes their love of games, in general, as they bond over chess, then Go, and even their relationship is a type of competitive game.

However, the ocean is also a type of playground, as Evie Beaulieu learns early in her life when her father uses her to test an early type of scuba equipment, leading her to spend as much time as she can underwater. She falls in love with the way the undersea animals play with one another or even by themselves. Unfortunately, humans also see the ocean as their playground, one more space they can colonize, disrupting and destroying the lives of those who were already there.

Ina Aroita’s life reinforces that idea, as she grew up on naval bases throughout the Pacific, but ends up on Makatea in French Polynesia, an island that phosphate mining had ravaged years before. Evie and Rafi are also there by the end of the novel, and a group of investors wants to use Makatea as a launching pad for man-made islands that exist outside of national jurisdictions (and, thus, regulations).

The narration moves between Todd’s telling his story to an unnamed listener—though the reader will ultimately discover who he’s talking to—and the stories of the three other characters until they all intersect on Makatea near the end of the novel. Powers also pulls a narrative trick, leaving the reader to wonder if the novel itself is one more playground, this time one that works for good.

In the same way that Powers helped readers see forests differently in Overstory, it’s clear he wants readers to wonder at the world beneath the sea, as he critiques the ways humanity has actively damaged oceans and the lives within. This time, though, he wants to remind readers that novelists can play, as well as preach.

Playground by Richard Powers. W.W. Norton, September 2024.

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: @kevinbrownwrite

Book Review :: My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

By the time psychotherapist Leah Fisher was in her early 60s, she was sick of eating dinner alone while her husband, Charley, worked late into the evening. She was also sick of his reluctance to take an extended vacation. But rather than stew in resentment or anger, she presented him with a carefully thought-out plan. If he couldn’t envision taking a year-long trip – a real break from their life in the San Francisco Bay – she’d go alone.

As she presented it, the idea was more of a negotiation than an ultimatum. After all, Fisher still loved Charley and wanted to remain married. Nonetheless, she was ready for something new, an adventure. As the pair talked, they came up with an arrangement in which Fisher would travel for several months and then return home for a week or two. They also broached sexual infidelity and developed ground rules for what would, and would not, be allowed. Moreover, Charley arranged his occasional vacations to meet her in some of the seven countries – Bali, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Java, and Mexico – she visited.

Fisher’s travels – staying in each location for a month or longer – allowed her to learn Spanish and dance salsa, all while maintaining the spark between her and her mate. It also allowed her to contribute to the communities she visited. Indeed, Fisher moved beyond tourism and volunteered in numerous capacities, running a short-term women’s group and translating and adapting a workbook, first created for American hurricane survivors, to help kids process their emotions after a mudslide destroyed their homes.

Deeply felt and emotionally honest, Fisher spent 16 years writing and revising My Marriage Sabbatical. As she and Charley continually alter their relationship, they model lived feminism and compromise. The result is wanderlust-inducing – the stuff of dreams and daring.

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love by Leah Fisher. She Writes Press, January 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 :: Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche book cover image

Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Journalist and longtime social justice activist Pat LaMarche’s latest book, Humble Pie, defies categorization. Yes, it deconstructs the horror of hunger in the US. And yes, it tells poignant stories of people – the housed, the unhoused, and the doubled-or-tripled up – who rely on the country’s nearly 100,000 food pantries to feed themselves and their families. And yes, it showcases the inadequacies of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs. But Humble Pie is more than an expose about people’s struggles. The book also sheds light on the cruel and arbitrary policies that govern both public and private social welfare programs and highlights the false narrative that continually smears low-income folks as undeserving, lazy, or morally lax.

Moreover, the book blurs the line between memoir – LaMarche’s account of the many years she’s worked to ameliorate hunger and homelessness – and cookbook. It’s a fascinating amalgam: Vivid anecdotes from homeless and formerly homeless individuals are presented alongside recipes for the low-cost meals they’ve created (or sometimes adapted). In addition, numerous budget-friendly recipes from British chef Archie, The Pie Guy, a former restauranteur, give the book heft.

“Food is more than sustenance,” LaMarche writes. “It is a form of communication, an expression of love.” Indeed, Humble Pie is a heaping serving of all of this. As a how-to guide, Humble Pie will help poor individuals and families survive. But the book can also be read as a policy guide for lawmakers, social service workers, and people who simply want to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors.

As LaMarche reports, approximately nine million people worldwide die of starvation annually. The US is not exempt: Anti-hunger researchers at Feeding America note that 40 million Americans are food insecure. “Starving children hamstring a country’s ability to flourish on the world stage,” she concludes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians remembered this?

All proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit anti-poverty organizations in Pennsylvania.

Humble Pie by Pat LaMarche, Illustrated by Jeremy Ruby. Charles Bruce Foundation, November 2024.

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 :: Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Ordinary Entanglement, Melissa Dickey speaks of the “harnessed unharnessed bound unbound” particular to a woman’s private life as mother, daughter, and lover and her reckoning with “power / and deception” in political society, “where marks are made.” But she “must be careful not to see everything / through a wound.”

This is a challenging endeavor for a mother when she realizes she has “brought / [her] children to [her] childhood”; when “betting on climate change [is a] good bet”; when the destruction of “historic Black neighborhoods” makes way for an interstate highway.

Dickey’s attention to what is unfolding internally — the thought of buying a “four-dollar coffee”— in response to what the poet encounters on the street — “people living / in tents”— is the entanglement of life. In other words, the phenomenon of “getting used to getting used to / a feeling [she doesn’t] want to get used to.”

The poet comes to recognize the plain fact that “everything we do we do at some cost.” It may be true that “people / have reasons for doing bad things / / but a reason doesn’t make the thing good.” And this is only one side of the reckoning, “Another knock / at the same door.” Dickey also aims to reckon with “goodness,” to “try to say ‘blessed’ and mean it.”

As she learns “how to live threaded / how to live tethered,” Melissa Dickey “disperse[s] what nags / let[s] a prayer unravel.”

Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey. CSU Poetry Center, October 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: EtC by Laura Mullen

EtC by Laura Mullen book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

In Laura Mullen’s EtC, “each good lyric [is] dislodged from its place,” making way for “each new definition” of “what to let matter, and how much, and when.” What matters to Mullen is what is “Reserved for advertising”—the female body, “Elsie the C,” corporate power, and the “Industrialization of America’s / food supply.” “[T]here are / Always more cows,” but “repetition could lead to estrangement.”

The collection’s title, EtC, doubles as the abbreviation for the Latin phrase et cetera and as an anacronym for “Elsie the Cow.” “It’s a matter / Of emphasis.” Or “repetition could lead to” a narrator “uncertain, potentially mistaken, exposed as unreliable.” “Nothing in this book / should be confused / with the actual.”

What is in this book is “an arrangement / Of grievances,” “a collection of cuts” related to “a mostly hostile country. America. A land where you’re expected to pay, one way or the other for intimacy.” Between “the world that is / and exhibition,” Mullen is “trying to make the word [milk] come back to sense” as nourishment and eschew extraction.

Whether what is “Measured in exchange” is “Meat or milk” or a woman’s body that “became another border to be crossed,” Laura Mullen’s EtC asks “The most urgent questions facing us.” The poet leaves the reader contorting the “Sacred, scared, / Scarred.”

EtC by Laura Mullen. Solid Objects, November 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Susto by Tommy Archuleta

Susto by Tommy Archuleta book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Before reading any poem in Tommy Archuleta’s Susto, the reader is situated by Eliseo “Cheo” Torres’s definition of “susto”: “1. shock; 2. magical fright.” That definition suggests the lyric, elegiac, surrealist, and fabulist poems to follow. The poems, presented in monostich, couplets, and tercets, fit the relationships central to Archuletta’s poems, the speaker-son’s relationship with himself and his relationship with his mother and father. The lack of poem titles has the effect of creating poetic continuity and expressing the continuousness of a son’s love for his parents and grief over their deaths.

Archuletta’s are personal poems, a “love / / letter to suffering” that he and his family have withstood. “Say little knives / litter the ground of every life / / we survive.” As the speaker-son “weep[s] / with” his life and “speak[s] to” his parent’s relationship he gains perspective, writing “light is light no matter how / dark things get.” This perspective is necessary to “survive [on] this side” and “keep singing.”

Each of the collection’s four sections contains one or two “Remedio[s],” botanical-based treatments sharing traditional knowledge for healing both spirit and body. The speaker-son is explicit about “suffering” caused by “pain / god and sometimes fever” that calls to be healed. The origins of some of the suffering remain private and mysterious—“after what happened / happened”—but nonetheless are felt. There is a sense that the speaker-son most desires to break out of an imprisonment of self, “the wolf you / the crow you / the weary supplicant.”

To break free, Tommy Archuleta is beseeching “of God,” “the ancients,” and of mother:

“Singing as
if I’ve always known

that hearing is the last
sense to go”

Tommy Archuleta’s songs “for you me and the ghosts / / inside us” all are those of a curandero and therefore spirit medicine.

Susto by Tommy Archuleta. The Center for Literary Publishing, April 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. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.

Book Review :: Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore

Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore book cover image

Review by Jami Macarty

Speaking from a Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore knows “the long burden / of… death.” In “Summer Swim,” the poet writes, “Too often, my poems are love notes / / to the past.”

While Whittemore’s poems harvest “a penchant / for melancholy,” they also write through an acceptance of multiple losses and a recovery of a whole self. Just as “death upon death” gives rise to an “urgent but futile wish to control its narrative,” so too, “is it possible to love one’s / own tattered self.”

The “tattered self” in Nest of Matches “seek[s], like every / / fled human before [her],” a sense of self “beyond fragmentation” and the “freedom” to “unfurl” a queer self as legitimate of life and worthy of love.

The tension between these dynamics is reflected in the collection’s title. In “nest” there is shelter but it is a hotbed of undesirable things. The hemispherical shape of a nest echoes in the sometimes-ruminating poems and in the twelve-poem series devoted to each month’s full moon.

In “Flower Moon,” a name given to May’s full moon attributed to the Algonquin peoples, Whittemore cues the reader to a “turn” of awareness “never-not-awkward”:

“Here I am again,
giving the moon
my baggage,
asking it to carry
my longing,
my fullness.”

Depicting the tidal forces between Earth and the moon and self and other, Whittemore’s “moon” series cannot help but conjure Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (1972). The moon is a feminine symbol associated with water, emotion, the rhythm of light, and the cycle of time. Or as Whittemore writes in “Aubade,” “there’s so many agains inside me,” “new and repetitious as moons.”

“Language remains a wobbly bridge” in Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, but language is what “veins” the collection’s “fearless and true” conversations over “life’s / many distances.”

Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore. Autumn House Press, March 2024.

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

Book Review :: The Detroit Lions by Dave Birkett

The Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timely by Dave Birkett book cover image

Review by Denise Hill

As a native Michigander and lifelong fan, I was excited to see Dave Birkett’s, The Detroit Lions : An Illustrated Timeline. First, there’s no one better to tell this story than Birkett, a sports journalist covering the team since 2010, and second – it’s the Detroit Lions! Still, I was skeptical I could appreciate this tome, with reminiscences back to the team’s start in 1934 (waaaay before my fan time) and (sorry Dave) likely a lot of stats to make my brain wander.

Winnowing 90 years of history down to under 200 pages, with pictures, is no small task, but Birkett harnesses this successfully. There is a new segment every page or two-page spread (perfect for open-book display) and a photo on every page.

Each segment focuses on a player, game, coach, element of play, or some facet related to the team. I learned the roots of the Thanksgiving game-day tradition (“Why is it always the Lions?”) and the team’s signature colors, Honolulu Blue and Silver, and about the two players who sang backup on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” While there are many celebratory stories, as a reporter and not a PR spin doctor, Birkett does not shy away from somber and sometimes downright shameful notes: rifts among personnel, devastating game losses, unethical behaviors, players sustaining life-altering injuries, and the passing of many greats due to various causes.

And yes, there’s data for enthusiasts who love to recall these key moments, but Birkett couches this within unique narratives, managing a fine balance to keep readers with a range of interests engaged. Birkett’s own voice is subtle, crafting the historical record and quotes from central figures to speak as the voice of The Lions. His rhetoric guides readers to sense the sorrow, disgust, frustration, excitement, and humor in many relived memories.

As Thanksgiving comes around, and you roll your eyes and once again ask, “Why is it always the Lions?” Answer: Because it’s THE LIONS! And each year, believe me, fans will also roll their eyes and ask, “Will they do it this year?”

What say you, Dave?

Don’t answer, because as true Lions fans know, predictions don’t matter. We always show up to cheer our team for the win.

The Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline by Dave Birkett. Reedy Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.