I read this book in just over a day, pushing back other commitments because I couldn’t bear to stop. The book is full of suspense which Kalagian Blunt creates in all sorts of ways. The most notable is her terrific characterisation. The main protagonist, Harlow, drives the narrative forward with just the right combination of intellectual acumen, warmth and anxiety. The reader becomes invested in Harlow and her desperate search for her missing father Scott.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies by Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali is a literary artist and polymath who so delights in language and possibility that he created a chrono-synclastic infundibulate safe space wherein physics are presented in a way that makes the moon even lovelier to poets and presumably presents poetry as lovely to physicists. Ali learned “how to use [his] breath to experience [his] body and the external world with deeper focus and deliberation.”
A review of G-d, Sleep, and Chaos by Alan Fyfe
Despite the profane subjects: dole queues, building sites, and the bottom of coffee cups; Fyfe elevates the ordinary to extraordinary heights with captivating imagery, and a musicality that gently lulls the reader into a meditative trance. In ‘A Song for Saint Roch’ ‘two pristine cigarettes’ are juxtaposed with ‘two (painted) apples’: elevating the former to high art reminiscent of ‘The Plastic Bag Scene’ in the film American Beauty; viewed through a poet’s lens, to seek beauty from the most mundane items.
A review of Cyborg Fever by Laurie Sheck
Cyborg Fever is a hallucinatory universe of detached disembodied voices and isolated monads – leptons, bosons, black holes, and human beings — forever striving for a ‘unified field’ but forever defeated by entropy and the forces of dissolution, vast emptiness, and disarray.
A review of Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
The author, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, exhibits great empathy for the Ukrainian people. For example, in “War: A One Way Street,” the poet “driving in [her] town,” imagines “sirens blaring, tanks rolling, / and guns pointing at people resisting.” There are no doves, no olive trees and as the stanzas unfold, she becomes “a woman raped,” “a fallen soldier,” “a father in exodus.” She has the emotional range to feel what they feel, calling herself “a person, and a nation, an ally, and an adversary.”
A review of The Ones by Kathleen Latham
Pick up this collection if you’re looking for catharsis in looking back on a history of love won and love lost. It is definitely keyed toward a more mature audience, but then might have good advice for the young and inexperienced: it will be painful, but in enduring we find something so much greater.
A review of A Life in Frames by by Leonora Ross
A Life in Frames, Leonora Ross’s third novel, is the coming-of-age story of a gifted young artist and the journeys he embarks on in his quest for self-discovery and the pursuit of his dreams. The story opens with ten year old Lejf Busher lying on a blanket under the African night sky in his parents’ backyard in Otijwarongo, Namibia—exhausted, but eyes filled with dreams.
A review of Jehovah Jukebox by Joan Jobe Smith
By the time they became acquainted, Smith had quit dancing to pursue poetry. Bukowski would call her late at night and howl at her tales of being a go-go girl for seven years (“the bad luck time for / breaking a mirror, minimum sentence for a felony / conviction”). Bukowski, in his cheap L.A. apartment forty miles away “listened intently to my go-go girl tales.” Finally, one night, Bukowski told her: “You gotta write about all that madness, kid. So I did.” Jehovah Jukebox was conceived and born.
A review of City Nature by Martha Retallick
The best moments come from the struggle against solitude; with Retallick, it’s the trials-and-errors of learning to “think like water” with her co-op in a drought-filled era, of upcycling a gifted chandelier into a vine climbing gym and a sun-shaking pendant collage. Not the “much more” of products, but the “much more” of the lived-in; we are nature too. The struggle against solitude is the discovery of home, and it glints like pendants.
A review of Age Like a Yogi by Victoria Moran
Passionate about her subjects, her inspired writing makes for inspiring and effortless reading. In her radio shows, podcasts, and videos about other subjects, you get the feeling that she’s speaking directly to you. Similarly, her conversational writing style can make you feel like she’s writing directly to you.