Metaphor, irony, and paradox abide in all five sections of this book. The ball in the opening poem of the first section, “And just like that,” becomes more than a ball “red hot as it flew overhead, each time / gathering speed covered / a greater distance,” literally in the park, figurative in the poet’s emotional landscape.
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A review of The Boy Who Loved Trees by M.M. De Voe
Although we see the inner journey of Artie and a couple of his closest friends, the story steps out of introspection enough to show us a good view of the 1980s-era occupied nation. Train stations, nightclubs, folk music, hotels and tourist sites, and the countryside and ordinary people’s homes paint a portrait of a nation with a vibrant culture, even under occupation.
A review of The Green Room by Cath Kenneally
The book is very much centred on water: its criticality to human and other forms of life, and the ways in which we are intimately connected by water to all living things. Though The Green Room is relatively short it covers a lot of ground, with thirty short poems that are powerfully condensed. Keneally utilises the gaps or silences between words and stanzas, often separating lines with double, triple or quadruple spaces. The poems flow like water, leaving plenty of room to pause and reflect between words.
Paper and Pixels: How Serious Readers Split Their Libraries
Every committed reader eventually faces the same question at the airport gate.
Do you carry the 600-page hardcover you’re halfway through, or the slim e-reader that holds it and four hundred other titles? For years the debate was framed as a loyalty test, paper purists on one side and early adopters on the other.
Plenty of readers have quietly settled it. They read both, and they’ve developed surprisingly consistent rules about which book goes where.
A review of One More for the Ditch: A Triptych by Eric McLaughlin
The plots of these three stories unfold slowly. All three have many characters, and each character is necessary, each plays a part in moving their story to its conclusion. In the first two stories the main characters are well intentioned but become victims of their own righteousness. Ironically the protagonist of “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” wins the war, not on the battlefield but within himself.
A review of Field of Vision by Stephanie Horvath
With a one-word title, a poem becomes a political statement, a thermometer of the zeitgeist. But Horvath refuses to settle down. Her North Star drives a quest for understanding. She is wondering about meaning and purpose, particularly when answers aren’t obvious. How do we know when it’s good? How do we know it’s enough? Where does the poem end?
A review of The Unnumbered Anniversaries by Kurt Olsson
Reading Kurt Olsson’s The Unnumbered Anniversaries is like believing that you’re walking a route you’ve taken since childhood, then waking up, that same landscape outside the bedroom window. It’s hard to separate the dream from the real. And it becomes true that the dream and the real are inseparable, maybe the same.
A review of Gone Guru by Nadine Browne
The story is so easy to read and humorous, that it’s easy to miss how much ground Browne covers. Gone Guru manages to balance post-modernist reflexiveness with a fast-paced mystery. This is very much a book about the process of its own construction
An interview with Mansi Dahal
In this extremely far-ranging interview of the long-form variety, the author of Women In Marigold talks about her practice, many of the poems in the collection, themes, her novels, fiction vs poetry, pressures and representation, Nepal, poetics, history, geneology, spirituality and faith, poetic mentorship, and so much more!
A review of Women In Marigold by Mansi Dahal
With the subject and object of Dahal’s poems fluctuating so often, it’s impressive how consistently she remains grounded in them. Her preference for plain assertions carries the firmness of an Oriana Fallaci interview, oratory with bite. Just as the line breaking into “me manipulative. A woman” summarizes the exhaustion of this poem, summarizing single images abound in others.