From Louisiana to Honduras, Susan Swartwout covers much ground in her poetry collection, Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit. The collection is billed as a gothic take on Southern culture, and in some aspects it is, but there is more here than meets the eyes or first reading. The collection also tells a family’s history and the impact of this on the life of the individual who tells it.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
The four novels making up the “Neapolitan” quartet follow the entwined lives of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo Carracci, from elementary school in the 1950s to Lila’s disappearance at age sixty. The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final volume, presents Elena and Lila in mid-life, both back in their crime-ridden impoverished neighbourhood. Their friendship, never harmonious, continues to go up and down until a tragedy and a sad aftermath change things.
A review of Overcoming OCD by Janet Singer and Seth J Gillian
Not only does Overcoming OCD provide advice, support, and hope to parents, but it also talks to some of the struggles that OCD puts on other siblings, the pitfalls to watch out for in certain types of treatments, things (like enabling) to be careful of, and above all, the importance of remaining positive even when the situation looks intractable.
A review of An Android Awakes by Mike French and Karl Brown
An Android Awakes is an entertaining, sexy, terrifying, and beautiful novel, full of bleakness and fun. While the book is probably not going to suit the prudish or faint-hearted reader looking for an easy read, other readers will enjoy the rich and powerful language, the complex plot lines, and the wacky and inventive landscape that both French and Brown have created in this superb graphical novel.
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A review of The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Buried Giant is not an easy book. Its simple prose belies the complexity of the narrative, and the multiple layers of meaning as Ishiguro presents us with extremes that are equally unpalatable, and both of which could well be seen as the modern condition. At times, the fog is enough to engulf the reader, and the work seems to be as obscure in its meaning as the location of Beatrice and Axl’s son’s village.
A review of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
To my mind, this is a clear, convincing and rounded account of the Holocaust, the best we have had to date. Snyder makes telling use of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian sources and he also pays meticulous attention to what the Nazis themselves wrote and said. The result is a context and a narrative in which – and, yes, it sounds almost immoral to say this – the Holocaust makes a kind of sense.
Martin Langford on his new book Ground
Martin Langford reads from his new poetry book Ground, and talks about his overarching principle of spaces places and the evolution of the book as a collection, about time and timelessness, about Australian history and how it plays out in…
A review of Lists of Note by Sean Usher
Ultimately, what Lists of Note shows us is that we’re not alone in our desire to tame the rush of information, tasks, and needs that bombards us everyday. Listmaking is both rational and helpful in our chaotic lives and has always been so. More importantly, Lists of Note teaches us that the list, is more than ephemera. It is a key to who we are, and at its best, can actually be a beautiful, and even artistic medium.
A review of IV (50 ‘I’ Statements) by Basil Eliades
Beyond the mistakes and the failings of humans which are highlighted in these poems, there is something that redeems us. We can, and must, love, and transcend. IV is a collection poetry about the ephemeral nature of life, of pain, about how we learn, grow, become mindful/present/enlightened, and above all, about love. No matter how much we’ve severed, sutured, eluded and deconstructed, love is always transformative.