Though each of the poems stands alone and indeed many of the poems in the collection were published individually, there is an underlying story that links the work together. This is a story of memory, loss, history and hubris. It’s a story about a new future and about the relics of the past that travel with us and are left behind as we transform – individually, and as a species. The poems are self-referential, memetic – with cultural ideas and motifs travelling from one poem to another, and metapoetic in a way that is somehow both humorous (at times) and profound.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Children of the Fall Volume 1: Wails of Mother Earth by Nicholas J Landon
A review of Gamers’ Rebellion by George Ivanoff
The Gamers trilogy will appeal particularly to fans of, Tron, Doctor Who and Pullman’s The Golden Compass (Northern Lights). It really does have everything: mind-bendingly awesome gadgets, characters you can’t help but care about and even a side-order of romance. But more than that this story, while deceptively simple on the surface, challenges readers to consider the big questions regarding our existence.
A review of Bread of the Lost by Philomena van Rijswijk
In nearly all of the poems, the subject and object perform a dance where roles are reversed, aligned, torn, and reconfigured, always with a kind of skewed nourishment, as in “Strangled Collision” where the bread is the love object, imbibed and absorbed like wine and grains of rice, crushed down in a Strangler Fig embrace.
A review of The Start Of Everything By Emily Winslow
The Start of Everything provides a generous helping of plot twists and turns, causing the reader to question virtually every theory they may construct as to the responsible party. Through this novel, Winslow raises the point that not everyone may be as they seem—there may be a touch of psychosis lurking right below the calmest of surfaces.
Bread of the Lost with Philomena Van Rijswijk
The author of Bread of the Lost talks about and reads lots of poems from her new poetry collection, discusses the notion of the ‘metaphorical feed’, the genesis of the book, the natural world as character, the wild animal beneath the…
A review of Rodin & Eros by Pascal Bonafoux
Most essays are centred on a particular work, and collectively they cover a period of about 40 years (1871-1911), for Rodin was always working, sketching even at the last. We learn some interesting things: for example, that The Kiss (1899) was inspired by Dante; that Rodin saw Nijinsky dance; of his affinity with Baudelaire, Mirbeau and Flaubert.
A review of Monster by Dave Zeltserman
We learn here that Mary Shelley’s novel was a fiction and a fabrication, Victor Frankenstein an unreliable narrator, to put it kindly. All in all, he’s a nasty, contemptible piece of work. Friedrich Hoffman is cast as an outcast, a wanderer and an avenger whose route towards payback takes in encounters with various Gothic grotesqueries: vampyres, werewolves, devil-worshippers, pseudo-Satanists (a la the Hellfire Club) and maybe even Dracula himself.
A review of The Songcatcher and Me by Ruth Latta
The term “songcatcher” is a beautiful word to describe the passion for archiving the old folk tunes that accompanied people as they came to settle in North America. The fascinating subtle differences of the different regions come to life.
A Review of Lifesaving Lessons: Notes From An Accidental Mother By Linda Greenlaw
She survived the storm that claimed the lives of the ill-fated fishing boat Andrea Gail’s crew (the Perfect Storm that inspired the book and film). But nothing prepared her for an even greater challenge—motherhood. Greenlaw chronicles her rapid journey from a self-sufficient, adventurous fisherman to the legal guardian of a teenager in Lifesaving Lessons: Notes from an Accidental Mother.