All of which is to say that this smallish, quiet book is magnificent. But you can’t get away with reading it once, or quickly. It calls you back, draws you in, tricks you into thinking it’s about flying owls, changing peed sheets, watching water wash over the rocks, and taking out the trash, and indeed it is about peed sheets, owls, and taking out the trash just as our lives are about those things, and yet, it is also about everything.
Author:
A review of Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound by Yvonne Zipter
Personification and identification are routes to empathy, to feeling what is felt by another: another person, an animal, an inanimate object. Yvonne Zipter pursues this goal by swapping pieces of herself with pieces of the world.
New giveaway!
We have a copy of Blooming in Winter by Pamela Valois 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 July from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
New giveaway!
We have a copy of Nancy Business by R.W.R McDonald 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 first of July from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
An interview with RWR McDonald
The author of Nancy Business talks about the premise of his new book and where the idea came from, on being adopted into the Crime genre community, his twelve year old narrator, his New Zealand setting, books he’s recently read and loved, and more.
A review of Chimera by Jane Skelton
Chimera says a lot in so few pages, Skelton makes the reader enter moments, fragments of time, the land, life: imagined and real. In this book Skelton once more has demonstrated her skills as a writer.
A review of Ash Wedding by Clarinda Harriss/Peter Bruun
Just as her previous collaboration with Peter Bruun, Innumerable Moons, deals with love, loss and grief in later life, so too does Clarinda Harriss’ new collection, Ash Wedding, amounts to an extended elegy for Harriss’ friend, Steve Davitt, whom she’d known for more than three decades and with whom she spent the final two years of his life. Davitt suffered a massive heart attack while walking their dog on the streets of Baltimore in April of that already devastating year, 2020. The dominant theme in these poems is grief, raw, unassuageable grief.
A review of Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements by Jay Kirk
Slivers of Kirk’s sometimes funny, sometimes traumatic personal history overlap and complement and reflect one another throughout the book. He spends a good part of the book searching in Transylvania for a lost manuscript, purportedly the work of none other than the great Béla Bartók, and spends another large chunk of it organizing strange activities on the deck of a cruise ship navigating some of the world’s remotest waters. Interwoven with these threads are passages in which Kirk frets over his seriously ill father, who, in one video call, strikes him as looking, in Kirk’s words, about a million years old.
A review of You Don’t Have To Go To Mars For Love by Yona Harvey
Reading through You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, I experienced a litany of emotion that found me racking through memories, hopes, and losses. The work is astoundingly raw and explorative. Harvey dances between forms and visual presentation with the precision and coherency of a professor, the care of a mother, and the creative wield of a comic book artist.
Interview with Richard Souza
The author of A Cage Full of Monkeys talks about his new book, the word “Saudade” and the role it plays in his life, his early sexual experiences, memory imagined and reconfigured, his literary references, why he wrote the book, and lots more.