Book Reviews
We have a copy of Gods of Deception by David Adams Cleveland 
to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of May from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some tidbits are amusing: that serious-faced woman was a high school baton twirler! Her family called her Kiki. She loved a good poppy seed bagel. Ginsburg also stockpiled Notorious RBG shirts, and enjoyed giving them as gifts. One wonders if the Queen of England does the same with tea towels.
Did W.R. ruin Marion’s life and career? I would say “No.”. She enjoyed a period of stardom like many actors, though her forty-eight films in twenty years were uneven in quality. She married unhappily and drank too much, but she appears to have been a well-functioning alcoholic noted for her philanthropy, especially to children’s charities. At the time of her death she was the richest woman in Hollywood. The title, The Blue Butterfly, suggests sadness, but my view is that she was a rosebud who became a rose.
The writing in Masquerade is erudite, with frequent literary allusions that enrich the poems. From the moment young Wright meets the handsome neighbor to her writing studio, the pheromones are on high alert. In “At First Sight,” she writes of “Kismet’s / metabolic blow-dart” but signals premonition with the final question, “Cupid’s curse / or Caliban’s