Patrick Connors’ poems are unpretentious and refreshingly authentic. The Other Life is a flowing read. There were times I stopped to savor and ponder his words. We readers are invested and interested in learning the nuances of specific character’s lives. Connors speaks clearly.
Author:
A review of Morning Will Come by Billy Lombardo
Billy Lombardo’s novel Morning Will Come captures a family in the unrelenting grip of grief. When Audrey and Alan Taylor’s teenage daughter Isabel goes missing, they and their two younger sons Dex and Sammy must contend with what remains, with the continuous presence of her absence. Lombardo both magnifies and expands this absence through language tight and unsparing.
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A review of Make For Higher Ground by Diane Lee Moomey
A gorgeous collection full of sky and light, these poems tell stories that remember, long for, miss and sustain love. Importantly, there is nothing saccharin here. Indeed, the last poem ends ominously, “Making coffee, breaking camp—/we do this well together,/but whitecaps, winds and lowered skies; promise heavy weather.” And that’s the point. Higher ground is not a panacea; it isn’t even a place. It is a way of being in the world that Moomey gently urges in this compelling collection.
A review of Tell Me How You Got Here by Emily Franklin
Emily Franklin’s debut poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here is an emotional exploration of the ways family and possessions become embedded in our consciousness, perhaps even lodged in our DNA. Our attempts to soothe the pain of inherited memories by “forgetting, mottling as salve/for the soul” are often fruitless because the “potholes of memory” make erasure impossible.
A review of Coolest American Stories 2022 edited by Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey
One of the coolest things about the thirteen stories that make up this collection and makes them legitimate contenders for the title is the sense of revelation that each embodies, whether it’s a poignant insight into love or suicide or your “otherness,” or even just the quotidian awareness of being hungry after watching a lion bite off your mob boss’s head, as in S.A. Cosby’s hilarious noir, “Pantera Rex.” Each of these stories has its moment, some more subtle than others, some more dire. (Look no further than the first story, Lori D. Johnson’s “Shepherd’s Hell,” if you’re looking for “dire.”)
A review of Sister Séance by Aimee Parkison
Parkison’s novel is quite chilling even with its slow buildup. The story’s pace means every chapter ends with either some new revelation or some progression towards something worse, and the rotating perspectives means creates dramatic irony that pays off with each new chapter. This allows the story to earn its more fantastic moments, as the realistic, recognizable horror permits for it’s absolutely wild climax.
A review of Bed by Elizabeth Metzger
Within the spare and taut words, the compact lines that the author fashions in her poetry are found grief, love, intimacy, spirituality, death, yet an emotional distance and mystery (lots of it). In fact, it is mystery that has kept this reviewer off-balance throughout the book, as in the lines: “Wind from nowhere / It did not get up / from its snoring carriage / or offer me a bottled / sense of the near future.” Her lines are simple, their meaning complex.
A review of The Breath by Cindy Savett
Savett’s incantations are strident and introduce recurrent images (clay, sparrow, dirt, twin). They function stylistically like the choral strophe and antistrophe of Ancient Greek tragedies, repeating phrases in a histrionic voice. As such, they deepen the tone of devastation and misfortune.
An interview with Gary Slaughter
The author of WWII POWs in America and Abroad talks about why he wrote his book, the often-overlooked perspectives of the 6 million people held in prison camps in the U.S. and around the world between 1939 and 1945, about what life was like for an imprisoned officer, about growing up in Owosso during WWII, classic movies, collaborating with his wife, and lots more.