This short story collection by doctor/ writer Fiona Robertson, lures us into intimate scenarios where joy and its adversary– fear– are coterminous. From a lovelorn housewife caught in a literal storm and a lonely man in a housing estate, Robertson’s characters drip in pathos and multidimensionality within the tight confines of each story, leaving readers saying a reticent farewell, wondering after the characters, ambivalent about their predicaments.
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We have a copy of From Your Hostess At The T&A Museum by Kathleen Balma to give away!
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Writing From a Very Dark Place: A Conversation with Katerina Canyon
Recently, I received a review copy of Surviving Home, by Katerina Canyon. I knew of Katerina from a weekly virtual poetry reading series that she runs, called “Canyon Poets.” She is a self-made poet, community activist, and poetry agitator. Surviving Home is a series of narrated poems describing surviving an abusive childhood, being raised in an abusive home, and sometimes being homeless. I found that I couldn’t review the book in good faith; although I felt compassion for her story, its overwhelming darkness felt too dense for me to penetrate.
A review of Bombay Hangovers by Rochelle Potkar
This meticulous nature of her research into each story marks her out from other writers. This is again evident in another beautiful story where a Parsi youth is obsessed with creating his own brand of perfume (Parfum). Rochelle goes into a heady mixture of the scents and perfumes employed. She even has a lab where the protagonist works to manufacture that one perfume that can be his own. Finally, instead of his wife, he finds solace in the arms of a maid whose function is merely to be like a springboard of scents.
A review of Woman by the Door by Kashiana Singh
Singh is a family-person in the world, besides all other things she may be. And for her the act of cooking is akin to praying, many-a-times the aroma of pungent onions, garlic over fingertips wafting out of time spans, losing gravity but never gravitas to become laced with familial inter-textualities.
A Nontraditional Life: Navigating With(out) Instruments by traci kato-kiriyama
Time and again, kato-kiriyama pushes the reader to continue their hard work to understand and enact her “pan-generational consciousness.” The arts activism to build community in ICON 6; the call to treat all humans with utmost empathy, always, in ICON 9’s N.T.S.; kato-kiriyama speaking aloud her queer identity to “the curious Uncle or Auntie” who doesn’t quite understand and ICON 10’s N.T.S. reminder that “I am a little crazy./This is very normal,” living this nontraditional life to confront, take action, and heal through her Japanese American Angeleño identity.
A review of Something So Precious by James Lee
Something So Precious is a novella that explores at once the thrill of youth, suffocation of legacy, the secrets families keep and the elusive nature of desire. Some of the prose would not seem out of place in a novel by Anaïs Nin, as it delves deftly into the intricacies of love affairs with both realism, poetic lyricism and philosophical musing. I mention Nin in particular because she was a visionary in femme erotica and Lee’s prose, for a male writer, not unlike Pedro Almodóvar’s films, touched me for its understanding of femme desire.
A review of With by Kenning JP Garcia
Is this a truly Copernican exploratory adventure in poetry then, or just another academic Ptolemy-ization of contemporary verse? The former, who believed in Earth-centered astronomy, famously endeavored to complicate the data so as to account for the anomalies that were fast gathering around him making undeniable the proof that he was wrong…pointing out the proverbial elephant in the room so to speak, the emperor’s new clothes: nakedness. JP Garcia exercises something of the scientists’ precision talent with their diary here.
Great new giveaway!
We have a copy of The Daddy Chronicles by Jayne Martin to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of March from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
A review of A Better Class of People by Robert Lopez
Here there is heartache and trauma and humanity. There is detachment and longing and grief. Maybe we need to expand the umbrella that covers a “better class” of people. Or maybe, our narrator is accurate when, early in the book, he asserts, “Everyone I know is horrible.”