Twelve Days of Transfer tells the story of Kedney’s own unsuccessful attempts at carrying a child, the complex emotional responses to the inability to conceive, the guilt, the grief, but also the relief. She writes about her experiences in grief support groups and with friends, as well as her own complex IVF experience.
A review of Clarion by Jenny Pollak
This book is a poetic and visual artistry, it is also a love song shaped from nature’s elements — sand, salt and time. Pollak reminds us that sticks, though broken, remain strong, wild and full of untamed beauty, capable of profound acts of resilience and grace.
A review of So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne
You immediately empathise with each of these characters as you turn the pages to their respective POVs, and that’s precisely the glitter of Bourne’s writing. Her character-driven templates are so watertight, and her characters so realistic that you can even imagine them as real people in your own life.
Of Loyalty to Father & Country: A review of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China Edward Wong
A review of The Suspension Bridge by Anna Dowdall
The Suspension Bridge is a good, even excellent novel which unfolds logically and leaves the reader thinking about human nature, the supernatural, and the social changes that began in the 1960’s. I remember those days.
A review of Mycocosmic: Poems by Lesley Wheeler
Wheeler’s ideas synthesize unusual word groupings; from these combinations new qualities emerge, such as unpredictably jarring, sometimes funny internal and end rhymes, line breaks, and punctuation, not unlike the way speakers of a language are able to generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of syntactical rules.
A review of Bare Ana and Other Stories by Robert Shapard
A spectrum of characters populates the prismatic flash in Bare Ana. Every story sings a surprise or a change of perspective. A couple honeymoons in Wakiki, but the husband falls off a twelfth-floor balcony. A young girl in a leotard flips an impossible set in front of a judges’ panel. A weather forecaster flies off – not to another television station – but on a renegade weather balloon.
Unbuttoning Fish: An Interview with Robert Shapard about “Bare Ana and Other Stories”
Author and editor Diane Gottlieb speaks with Robert Shapard on Zoom about his fascinating life in the flash world, the importance of detail and image in very short fiction, and how stories come to him.
A review of In Which by Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel has her serious side, too, if often couched in irony. In “Poem in Which I Have Doubts and Then Some Faith” she laments the demise of people reading books – people on the beach glued to their phones reading Instagram, texts, Whatever. And then she notes, “DeSantis wants to ban books,” referring to the autocratic governor of Florida, where she lives.
An Interview with Suzanne Mercury
Suzanne Mercury is a poet whose work lies in the interstices of the natural and metaphysical world. In this interview she talks about her latest book Hive, about Magic Squares, bees, writing exercises, ecology, and more.