Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A review of City Scattered by Tyler Mills

Tyler Mills’ new poetry chapbook City Scattered is in four voices, like a poetic radio play set in Berlin in 1930 when radio was booming. Mills weaves four voices/characters in an emulation of an old-style radio drama that invites the reader to explore the lives of women at this time in the context of a society dangling on the edge of totalitarianism and a world on fire. Each of the four steady voices throughout the book have poems that enrich the story we are invited into.

A review of Acanthus by Claire Potter

Claire Potter’s Acanthus both draws on mythology and subsumes the intimate and personal into its broader terrain. Potter’s work is consistently compelling, utilising the reservoir of cultural knowledge abundant in mythological stories and heroes.

New giveaway!

We have a copy of Suburban Death Project by Aimee Parkison 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 May from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!

A review of One April After the War by C S Boarman

Throughout the novel, the author’s exhaustive knowledge of the era’s politics, technology,  social mores, and the geography of Kentucky and Ohio, come into play, with the result that the reader is totally immersed in the historic setting. 

A review of Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill

Daisy & Woolf is a rich, complex book that blurs binaries and boundaries, provoking big questions around art, parenting, love, privilege, colonisation, and creativity.The narrative flows quickly, driven by its dual protagonists, with the book unfolding its denser meaning later, in the shared collaborative space between reader and writer.

A review of Friday Book by John Barth

Essays can often have a certain unapproachable quality. However, when you read Barth, you can’t expect a constant stream of seriousness, or at least seriousness in the most acceptable times. Even before the barrage of essays comes forth to dazzle us, under the heading “The Title of This Book,” he already starts with some unserious seriousness when reflecting on the various sorts of titles floating around in the literary world—while refraining from actually speaking of his title much at all.

On the Spirituality of Keisha-Gaye Anderson’s A Spell For Living

Spirituality is at the core of Anderson’s work. In it, she talks about God, the self, and the universe in one breath. These, and more, are attributes that shine light on spirituality but do not define it in totality. Anderson’s poetry leads to this point, that of knowing yet not knowing while searching for meaning.

New giveaway!

We have a copy of Gods of Deception by David Adams Cleveland 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 May from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!