Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving by Katie Farris
Farris both hides behind a mask and doesn’t. As any poetry creates a mask that both conceals and reveals, she gives readers poetic glimpses behind her mask with tight, lyrical lines. Farris controls the lens that we will look through to get to know her poetry and her personal medical journey. She gives readers an opportunity to see but not dwell upon the upheaval thrust on her life by interactions with medical staff, her husband, and the public.
A review of The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznki
While it can be imprecise to learn history from a novel, The Bohemians describes a time and place and its characters so vividly that it surely enhances what one might learn from the straight historical texts. This is a fine, worthy book with its defined and canny captures of Lange, Lee, Dixon and others, and an engaging, rewarding read.
An Appreciation of Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, an appreciator of different kinds of language and literature, a modernist who remembered tradition, describes Janie Crawford’s stifling life and surprising growth with language that is, as needed, confiding, folksy, general, poetic, philosophical, or startlingly specific.
A review of Sparring Partners by Charles Rammelkamp
Sparring Partners is only as much about boxing as Moby-Dick is about whaling. Like any true work of art, it’s about life, its fleeting glory, its many sadnesses, its long decline, and finally its inevitable disappearance. In the end it’s about accepting that we all fall and break apart, and as such, it’s a terrific read, well worth your time.
A review of Open Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Book
Tupelo is the perfect press to release a book like this. Founded in 2001, their twenty years of knowledge shines through, as does a pragmatism that I’m afraid could be lost if one of the big five publishers attempted to publisher a similar book. It’s apparent that Tupelo has a history of what they refer to on their website’s call for submissions as “energetic publicity and promotion.” That energy is contained in the dense sixty-some pages of Open Secrets.
A review of A Cartography of Home by Hayden Saunier
Saunier’s skills as a poet are showcased throughout this collection, but she works deftly and quietly, never browbeating the reader. A first read allows a simple pleasure in the words; it is upon a second and third read that nuanced layers unfold. For example, “Dirt Smart” begins with the lines, “You have to eat a peck of dirt / before you die, my grandma said. / I worried. Do I have to?” The poem continues with a description of the grandmother’s hard scrabble childhood in the tobacco fields “dug deep with labor, slaughter / and someone’s finger weighting every scale, / the way most land accumulation’s won.”
A review of Roger Federer, The Master by Christopher Clarey
What do disappointment, age, repeated injury, physical deterioration, last hopes, and the triumphs of rivals do to a sportsman and the narrative of his life? With so much unwritten, we can only ask, Why now? Why not wait until after the Big Three retire?
A review of More Lies by Richard James Allen
There is always a degree of artifice in the process of creating a narrative. A story must be constructed, and the many and multiple perspectives of reality fixed into something linear and sensical, which is, in its way, antithetical to the reality of life. Allen plays with this notion, weaving together multiple narrative threads into a story that sets itself up as a noir thriller with an engaging tagline: a writer held hostage by a beautiful woman, forced to type on his typewriter as a decoy to an assassination.
A review of A Review Failure Lyric by Kristina Marie Darling
In Failure Lyrics, she seems to resonate with the words of Browning’s failed lover who sighed to say, “Fail I alone in words and deeds/ Why, all men strive, but who succeeds?” Adamant defiance, compulsive self-acceptance, a foray into the world of failures much as a bastion dreaded by all, loved[!] by few, very few! How can one fall in love with failure? It may irk us to see the successful folks around but can anyone be complacent with failure, let alone come to terms with it considerably? Perhaps, therein lies the secret of Darling’s powerful, highly experimental verses.