Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A review of Kafka’s Shadow by Judith Skillman

It takes a lot of craftsmanship to have readers get inside the personalities and the culture of the characters in poems based on scholarship and detailed research—a huge task; all of the poems stick to the topic of Kafka and explore aspects of his family and his times.

A review of Dream Catcher by Margie Shaheed

Margie Shaheed’s Dream Catcher poems are eloquently woven word quilts. Life-filled, sensual, powerful, tender, courageous and unapologetic. Her poems are beautiful, richly crafted testaments written by a woman who knows and understands life in its many nuances.

We have a 3 book set of the Flinders Range series by Tricia Stringer including Heart of the Country, Dust on the Horizon, and Jewel of the North to giveaway. To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter.

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A review of The Restorer by Michael Sala

Maryanne’s own sense of self in relation to her overbearing mother and Freya’s sense of self in relation to Maryanne are handled with such richness that they give the story a great deal of depth, even as it pushes towards its inevitable outcome. The Restorer is a beautifully written and very powerful fiction that not only shines a light on the deep roots of domestic violence but also plays with the line of what remains in the face of such destruction. Sala’s story that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

Strange Migrations: on the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

For the cast of characters the present has no meaning. They are suspended between the places they have left and a fantasy of a future home. These are the superimpositions of images that color their thoughts, their dreams, and their narratives – the binaries of home and abroad, the past and the future, the real and fantasy.

A review of Line Study of a Motel Clerk by Allison Pitinii Davis

Art, in this messy overlayering, produces “some kind of complicated, collective accuracy.” Like the best works, Line Study gives a sense of speaking to the present as if to the future. “Because the ones who wrote today’s edition,” as Davis writes in the titular and final poem, “have already written tomorrow’s.” Should we all be so lucky to actually hear Tiresias speak.