How Skelley is able to write lines that simultaneously describe, illuminate, juxtapose, and contradict is anyone’s guess. There is an intimacy, a voyeuristic quality to this work overall, as we turn each page, as if we’ve happened upon these poems, found them stashed away in a jean jacket pocket or borrowed them from a friend, like that treasured indie rock vinyl record. The lines are meant to be savored and shared. This is a collection that slows down time, forces the reader to stop and linger awhile.
A review of T by Alan Fyfe
Fyfe does a terrific job in capturing both the seductive pull of T’s need and his rapid decline and things begin to disintegrate. Told in third person narrative, with T’s point of view, the story follows T’s various attempts to score, sell, find a place to live, and in some odd way, to find meaning. To say that T’s world is grungy would be an understatement, but Fyfe’s writing is consistently rich and poetic.
Fiction as Palimpsest: The Revelatory Lie: Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, the Lovers
And so we enter into the fiction with both curiosity and fascination, which Gammon masterfully both milks and sustains as she gives us the details, enough to keep us guessing, like voyeurs, like amateur sleuths, as though we might deduce the truth from her fiction—it’s seduction and frankly ingenious.
A review of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk
As Uschuk probes the wounds of contemporary existence, we see how deeply she understands human suffering. Fortunately for readers, the author also brings abundant love for this difficult, complicated world that somehow keeps going. As “The Essential Shape” (100) reminds us, “Spinning, the earth begins” again, and “shapes itself with fingers of light.”
An Inner Habitat for Searching: a Review of Rewild by Meredith Stricker
I do not think Rewild suggests that love will save the human race. Rather, it brings us to consider that by participating in love we will save love, perhaps contributing to its existence and triumph in the cosmos—animism from an earlier human understanding of the world, wielded against indifference. We can infer the possibility of a universe without mankind.
A review of SEO 2023: Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies by Adam Clarke
Clarke’s book is an impressive, comprehensive guide that dexterously navigates the complex and often cryptic universe of SEO. It’s a challenging task to make such a technical subject palatable to a diverse audience, but Clarke manages to do so with aplomb.
A review of The Lottery and Corruption in the U.S. by Harold Rosen
Reviewed by Dale Shelabarger Lottery Corruption, U.S.A by Harold Rosen AuthorHouse November 2020, Paperback, 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1665506649 The game of chance has fascinated humanity for centuries, creating a compelling narrative of luck, fate, and fortune. And none is more…
An interview with Kelly Weber, author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place
The author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place talks about her latest book and how it evolved, her composition process, on writing about alternative erotics in kindship with the ecological world and in platonic relationships, on family stories that directly and indirectly teach about power dynamics, gender and sexuality expectations, and wounds, mythology and symbolism, and lots more.
A review of The Misconceiver by Lucy Ferriss
It’s gobsmacking how much author and prognosticator Lucy Ferris got right in this book, first published in 1997 and reissued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Ubiquitous online access, electronic payments, electric vehicles, environmental destruction, codified discrimination against gays and lesbians — the Lucy Ferris of the 1990s foresaw this current, fraught decade with uncanny accuracy.
A review of Bad Art Mother By Edwina Preston
There is so much about this book that is compelling. It manages to be both funny and tragic at the same time, without stereotypes or polemic. Though there are moments of bad behaviour on the part of pretty much every character, nothing is over-simplified. There are as many different ways to create art, from Jo’s food or charity work, to the Mirka Mora styled murals of Jo’s waitress Rosa, or the ikebana flower arrangements of Mrs Parish, as there are ways to be a partner, a parent, or a patron.