Daisy & Woolf is a rich, complex book that blurs binaries and boundaries, provoking big questions around art, parenting, love, privilege, colonisation, and creativity.The narrative flows quickly, driven by its dual protagonists, with the book unfolding its denser meaning later, in the shared collaborative space between reader and writer.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Friday Book by John Barth
Essays can often have a certain unapproachable quality. However, when you read Barth, you can’t expect a constant stream of seriousness, or at least seriousness in the most acceptable times. Even before the barrage of essays comes forth to dazzle us, under the heading “The Title of This Book,” he already starts with some unserious seriousness when reflecting on the various sorts of titles floating around in the literary world—while refraining from actually speaking of his title much at all.
On the Spirituality of Keisha-Gaye Anderson’s A Spell For Living
Spirituality is at the core of Anderson’s work. In it, she talks about God, the self, and the universe in one breath. These, and more, are attributes that shine light on spirituality but do not define it in totality. Anderson’s poetry leads to this point, that of knowing yet not knowing while searching for meaning.
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A review of The Age of Fibs by Beth Spencer
It is always both true and fictive, and like dreams, pieced together from a grab-bag of images and turned into stories that reflect the themes being explored. The Age of Fibs picks up on this uncertainty beautifully and works with it, allowing for openness, complexity, and fragmentation, while still keeping the coherency of the story intact.
A review of The Pink Book by Henry Von Doussa
The book is a series of personal essays and collages bound in an exquisite coffee-table book; it bursts with colour and nuance yet simplicity and dedication to the characters and stories that lie within. Interwoven with touchingly personal stories of childhood and young adulthood and philosophies on life, it is a challenge to put The Pink Book down.
A review of Masks: Stories from a Pandemic by Peter Cherches
Set in New York City, the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic when it first came to the United States in 2020, these stories all involve masks – cloth masks, surgical masks, N95s, KN95s, you name it; wearing them on the subway, at the grocery, in the post office, outdoors, standing in line, at home.
A review of Resistance Is a Blue Spanish Guitar by George Wallace
Wallace’s voice is compelling and instructive. Parenthetical asides abound, as if he is telling us, in an aside, crucial information to elucidate and amplify his lessons. He can also be funny. “The Real Dookie” is a whimsical poem about the rise and fall of a Beat Poet (“the real dookie”). “Goodbye Angelina” is in the aw-shucks voice of a Texas cowpoke who has been sleeping with the wife of an absent husband.
A review of The Necessity of Wildfire by Caitlin Scarano
It is from gifts of intellectual and creative awareness that a poet can make subtle assertions, even if the gifts have been painfully wrought. Poems in this collection examine emotions of anger, grief, rage, shame and regret, often within careful nature-based metaphors. The poems are rich in description of place and nature that are nonjudgmental and move the collection forward.
A Disgusting Fate Befalls Deplorables: A Review of The Filthy Marauders by Bob Freville
This isn’t to say that the characters in The Filthy Marauders aren’t memorable. If anything the opposite is true; Freville’s gift seems to lie in his ability to craft flesh-and-blood eccentrics with voices that are all their own. It is only too disappointing that he has more enthusiasm for their suffering than he does for their redemption.