Review by Peter Mladinic
“The beauty Barry renders in lines and rhythms, Flynn evokes in images and tones. I Tell Henrietta is about family, friends and acquaintances, and ultimately, the reader.”
Review by Laurie Nguyen
“In this fractured mess of a world, once you forgive someone, accountability no longer matters. Mateer’s question is the same one I echo to others: ‘What has forgiveness done except elongate the line of broken women in his path?'”
Review by Valerie Fox
“Right This Way excels as suburban comedy of manners, with a tinge of satire, a lightness that overlays a darkness and the presence of grief and great loss.”
Review by Peter Mladinic
“Kentucky is in these poems, specifically eastern Kentucky, the poet’s ancestral home, and Ohio, specifically Dayton, so much so that Ohio, where Bentley lives, is a metaphor for the world.”
Review by Brendan Rowland
“[Spiegel’s] collection exercises a razor gaze, analyzing and dissecting through images … sparse treatments express his childhood sense of being an imposter, and his conclusion communicates this uneasiness persists despite his new stage of life.”
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
“About twenty years ago, I stole a translation of Jean Cocteau’s The White Book because the owner was homophobic. I suppose I believe (or at least hope) books find the right readers.”
Review by Al Dickenson
“The lyricism of Driscoll’s writing is a trait that brings the reader into the stories: when reading, you feel as though you are standing on the porch or sitting in the fishing boat, hanging on every word the characters say, as you feel not for them, but with them.”
Review by Peter Burzyński
Chelsea Tadeyeske is the progenitor of a type of anti-aphoristic aphorisms that are at first glance disparate thoughts strung together, but ultimately are deep, cutting, and brilliant interconnected jibes that paralyze and, paradoxically, entice.
Review by Valerie Fox
The flash fictions in Dan Crawley’s latest collection, Blur, seamlessly go back and forth between his characters’ pasts and presents, between calm and storm.
Review by Peter Kline
“Benjamin Niespodziany’s ambitious and engaging new collection of prose poems, Cardboard Clouds, ushers readers into a world of madcap theater and casual danger where the curtain might rise on all manner of weather and monsters and fantastical impossibilities. “
Review by Penelope Moffet
“The poems of small mammals are so well-crafted the craft is nearly invisible; while highly polished, they have not been polished to death.”
Review by Valerie Fox
Lynn Levin, accomplished and prolific poet and translator of poetry, has brought her refined aesthetic to House Parties, her debut short fiction collection. As in her poems, she develops characters through distinctive voices and reveals insights by vivid imagery.
Review by John Brantingham
“The idea behind the book is that it is not enough simply to not forget the Holocaust. We must learn from it.”
Review by Alex Carrigan
In her debut short story collection Earth Angel (CLASH Books, April 2023), Madeline Cash presents sixteen stories that attempt to digest the absurdity and cynicism of late millennials and early zoomers into bite-sized archives of rote human experiences.
By Wally Swist
The Hyakunin Isshu can be translated as “one hundred poets (or people), one poem.” It is one of the several venerable anthologies of Japanese poetry. The Hyakunin was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), and the first full-color edition was published in 1775.
Review by Al Dickenson
“On the Hoof also provides a glimpse into the past, where travelers would ride their horses across great distances for adventure, prosperity, and to test their endurance.”
Review by H. V. Cramond
“The porousness and openness of Pai’s poems, their eternal present, reads not as an avoidance or a fuzzy, COVID decimated sense of time brought on by endless time online. Rather this opening is way of protection through integration.”
Review by Alex Carrigan
It’s fairly safe to say that Christopher Columbus ruined the world. The voyage to the New World resulted in colonization, slave trading, and various crimes against humanity that were glossed over when presenting Columbus as this great navigator and adventurer.
Review by Keith J. Powell
Baby is a Thing Best Whispered, the debut collection of flash fiction from Keely O’Shaughnessy, is twenty-two concise tales of frayed familial bonds and bruised but resilient outsiders who really aren’t interested in your pity.
Review by Wally Swist
Early on in reading Michael Simms’ new novel, Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy, I heard a tone so distinct that I realized I hadn’t heard in years– that being one of true satire.
Review by Keith J. Powell
In her new collection, author Dallas Woodburn pairs intimate stories with clever structures to explore grief, ghosts, and how to make do with the pieces still available to us.
Review by Alex Carrigan
The fascination Americans have with serial killers is at multiple times fascinating, haunting, and strangely comical.
Review by Wally Swist
Poetic Dynamism, Higher Consciousness, and the Lyric Voice
In considering Diane Frank’s most recent publication, While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, what may be most ostensible is not just this poet’s irrepressible lyricism but an imagistic lyricism embedded with what Robert Bly called “the deep image.”
Review by Toti O’Brien
Hiram Larew’s fifth poetry collection was birthed during the pandemic, mostly (says the publisher’s note) during “outdoors rambles” rather than within homebound insularity.
Review by Isabella Nugent
Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel Win Me Something is a rare book that centers biracial Asian experience. It asks: What happens when you fit in nowhere?
Review by Kristin Dykstra
This is a book that channels readers first in one direction, then another. The title of the collection by Silvina López Medín (Argentina/US) gives the power of speech to salt, which speaks a plant, perhaps a landscape.
Review by Abeer Hoque
Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s memoir, an astonishing literary act of radical empathy. It doesn’t matter how differently you grew up from him, a poor dark-skinned Black gay boy in small town Ohio. You will understand every terrible choice he makes and why.
Review by Sparrow
Why read about a family? Why study the story of four individuals you don’t know, who also (in the case of a novel) don’t exist? Jules Silver grows up in Queens with a depressed, suicidal mother and a sullen younger brother.
Isaac George Lauritsen reviews Fjords vol. 2 by Zachary Schomburg
Poets like to write about death. That’s about as honest as death itself. Maybe we do it for reasons similar to those Zachary Schomburg outlines in his essay, “Poetry as Violence,” where he writes of death: “it is the absolute truth… something we all have in common, a common and uniting plight.”
Review by Wally Swist
“before daylight touches the hill the backs of the wild geese:”
If the spiritual maxim about finding what is large in what is small and what is small in what is large can be applied to paul m.’s new book of haiku, witness tree, then “The Big Elm” in the “Agawam Meadows” serves as a metaphor not only for what is perhaps most significant regarding not only m.’s haiku but the art of haiku itself.