Though set in Naples, The Lying Life of Adults is not about friends rising from the slums, as in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Nor is it about the value of returning to one’s roots. Giovanna, the narrator-protagonist, who is twelve to sixteen during the novel’s time frame, is being raised in a progressive way by her middle-class, secular, intellectual parents.
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A review of Vegan Junk Food by Zacchary Bird
The name of the book is, of course, a misnomer. There’s nothing junky about these recipes, which use high quality fresh ingredients, often made from scratch and generally, with only a few (worth it) exceptions, pretty healthy. However, Vegan Junk Food is not a book that tries to extol the health virtues of eating a vegan diet. Veganism is better for the planet and less cruel to animals, and that’s reason enough to eat vegan more often.
A review of Sonnets by Theresa Rodriguez
As both a poet and a trained classical singer, Rodriguez is more consciously aware of the musicality of poetry than most, and it is not surprising that other poems in this collection such as ‘The Piano,’ and ‘Oh, When I Hear,’ also take music as a subject. Most are of course not directly about music, per se, though all display the melodious qualities of regular meter and perfect rhyme.
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A review of Theatrix: Poetry Plays by Terese Svoboda
Svoboda’s verse is playful, a true delight. As Alan Michael Parker writes in his Introduction in the style of an Introduction, “…give us voices, and their own inner voices, the ways we have made gender our playmates, and how we make our bodies the play. Then stand close, and watch the players play.
An interview with Brianne Davis
Brianne Davis is a Hollywood actress, writer, producer and director. She can be seen as an actress in Lucifer, Casual, True Blood, the History Channel’s series Six, and the film Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. She has directed two films, The Night Visitor 2: Heather’s Story and Deadly Signal. In this in-depth Q&A, she talks about why she wrote her novel Secret Life of a Hollywood Sex & Love Addict, the relationship between her writing and acting, how much of her story is based on real-life, how music influences her work, how she structures her writing time, her Secret Life podcast, advice for those struggling with this disease, and lots more.
A review of My Father’s Face by Chandra Gurung
My Father’s Face is a very welcome collection from a neighbouring country, Nepal, and its contemporariness is what makes it both relevant and moving. At some places the editing and the translation could have been a bit tighter, and minor irritants like phrases/ structures like ‘an ocean of deep gashes’ or ’I am delightful’ could be worked on for future editions. Also an Introduction to the volume by the poet himself would help in grounding the poetry in more specific locales and circumstances.
A review of Alcestis in the Underworld by Nina Murray
Murray does not try to establish a perfect correspondence between these poems and the myth’s incidents and details; instead, the poems move freely back and forth between two planes of existence, the personal and the mythological, as they recall Murray’s youth in Ukraine and her subsequent career in the U.S. diplomatic service, particularly her time in Russia. The myth itself functions in the poems more like a reticulated canopy, casting an occasional net of shadows over the scenes taking place below.
A review of Snowdog by Kim Chinquee
This is a quietly impressive collection for lovers of the flash form, the traditional short story, and of poetic form. It is for dog-lovers, for mothers and lovers, and those for whom the routines, landscape, and concept of domesticity implies a multitude of contradictions and simultaneous truths. In her poised expressions and riddle-like compositions, we come to know the many dimensions of this Kim Chinquee/Elle character and her relationships.
A review of Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s by Tiffany Midge
The fifty-odd pieces that make up this collection are divided thematically into eleven different sections and take aim at national holidays, movies, language, literature and a host of other themes, from a Native American perspective, and culminate in a merciless assessment of the Donald Trump administration, the coup de grâce a poem entitled ”Ars Poetica by Donald Trump.”