From her corner in Brooklyn, Cara Bastone is able to highlight a new take on a New York romance in her new novel, Ready or Not, featuring the twists and turns of a surprise pregnancy, friendship struggles, and the bustling life of a career.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Days of Grace and Silence by Ann E. Wallace
Days of Grace And Silence, Ann E. Wallace’s profoundly moving and necessary poetry collection on living through Long Covid, makes us remember the things we may want to forget. And how important it is not to forget, as she writes, I fight to remember the story/ of me. Even though each of our stories are different, Wallace’s poems shed light on our own.
A review of earthwork by Jill Khoury
horse is a metaphor. It represents inner self, yearning for movement, kindness, courage, grace, leadership. There has to be trust and respect between the master and the friendly beast, a delicate line representing boundaries. It is a mirror that reflects the environment and also treatment of the master towards one’s horse. There is mystery in that amazing hard-earned trust.
A review of The Club of True Creators By Milan Tripović
The reason for this weirdness is found on a note on the publisher’s website, explaining that the translation was “AI-assisted” with “every word of the AI-generated translation … weighed by a professional stylist”.
A review of Homelight by Lola Haskins
Elegant in their refined, fluent use of words and eloquent in their visions and messages, these are luminous poems. While some poems are nearly haiku-short, others contain many stanzas, yet all resonate with beguiling, stirring words from a poet with a close connection to the natural world and an intense perceptiveness.
A review of Seeing Through by Ricky Ian Gordon
Even in the midst of this plague and the terrible death of so many beautiful people, most of whom I had a crush on as a teenager, there is always humour and a sense of the creative transformation which makes this book a constant joy to read. Ricky’s descriptions are so apt, darkly funny and full of delicious gossip, you want to commit them to memory for re-use.
A review of Turn Up the Heat by Ruth Danon
Light and heat serve as central metaphors for comfort. They represent the warmth Danon so desperately craves as an antidote to the cold she fears. Her fear is deeply rooted in the uncertainty and anxiety that accompany illness and hospitalization.
A review of Small Altars by Justin Gardiner
While the reader gets a sense of the arc of Aaron Gardiner’s life, Small Altars is written in short, episodic passages, jumping back and forth in time, some describing family scenes, others expository discussions of medical conditions, from schizophrenia to various cancers, the elements of comic book composition (both “on the page” and in conception as character and plot), biographical descriptions of various historical personalities – Claude Debussy, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Georges Remi among them – and more.
A review of Farhang Book One by Patrick Woodcock
Each poem is a work of art to be read and revisited time and again. Like a painting, the line length and shape of the poem can be continuously analysed and when we look at Woodcock’s work this way, we notice that even the most thematically brutal of poems can contain exquisitely beautiful images, full of nuance, subtlety and shade.
A review of A Fire at the Center by Karen Van Fossan
What Van Fossan delivers is life—a progress report on a directed but unfinished life, painfully acquainted with ambiguity and exquisitely cast in vibrant minimalist prose. Ultimately, the shadow of the book left in the reader’s mind is neither bound wrists nor angry fist but palms, unchastened, reverently touching.