Farris successfully grabs onto the reader and throwing them into the center of the action, along the meta, fourth-wall breaking asides that forces the readers to interact and not just observe. These unnamed characters who are often referred to their functions have broken through those constraining words. These forms created new life, new beings, and new meanings to what literal hybrid forms as Farris proves new literature should be just as bold as she demonstrated.
A review of What Could be Saved by Gregory Spatz
Spatz does an incredible job overlapping themes through the four short stories. Each entry feels like it’s picking up a thread from the previous story and then using that same thread as a baseline or expanding further on it. It also adds to the re-readability of this collection as in “What Could Be Saved”, “We Unlovely, Unloved”, “The Five”, and “Time and Legends” there are whiffs of reoccurring characters or motifs.
A review of Dandelion by Heather Swan
This is eloquent language. I find Swan’s syntax convincing and superior to many eco-poets I’ve read throughout the past decade. Her “Crop Duster” carries forth, in poetry, the very concerns Rachel Carson presented in prose in the 1960s and prior. Swan’s “Crop Duster,” (Pg.32-36) written in eight enumerated sections, tells of spraying used to suppress the gypsy moth, of an immune-compromised child, a lump in the girl’s neck.
A review of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if it’s a Lie by Steve Wasserman
Steve Wasserman has experienced enough for a handful of lifetimes. He is possessed of a great skill in weaving those allies and moments into a compelling narrative that is clear as a pane of glass. Though there are signs everywhere that he was an adept observer, one that takes good notes and has capacious memory.
Guess Who’s Written a Children’s Book? An interview with Wayne McDonald
The book is a combination of riddle poems and colorful, charming illustrations, challenging the reader to guess the mysterious animal on the next page. The animals are an eclectic bunch, from the well-known—bison, giraffe—to the more exotic such as the axolotl. The poems sneak in bits of “teacher” information and dashes of puns and humor. (To wit, regarding the axolotl, “You now know a ‘lotl’ about us….”)
A review of The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn
Neither The Braille Encyclopedia, nor Rebecca Solnit’s “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” which influenced Cohn, are mere catalogues though. While Solnit comments on the act of remembrance, a travelogue about a vanishing place using the form’s citational structure, Cohn’s use resembles remembering itself. If the absence of this web structure is felt, it also highlights how the book is less about its valid critiques of legalistic definitions of blindness or a piquant connection between the Andean abacus-like Quipu and braille as devices where “stories were stored in arrangements of strands.”
That Awful Confrontation of Body and Will: Dancers Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko) in The White Crow (Ralph Fiennes, 2018) and Baryshnikov (as Nikolai) in White Nights (Taylor Hackford, 1985)
Ballet is dance—it is delicate movements set to music, illustrating a tale: it is adagio (slow movements) and allegro (rapid movements) and arabesque (the body’s weight on one leg, with the other leg aloft, backward) and changement (change of feet) and fifth position (the heel of one foot against the toe of another, the two feet close, turned out) and plie (bending of a standing leg) and sauté (jump); and it is the life, the creative work, Rudolf Nureyev wanted.
A review of Steerage by Robert Cooperman
Cooperman’s narrative proceeds with something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, all three children under Big Nathan’s thumb, Rivka and Simon the chorus supplying the agonizing commentary in their strophe and antistrophe. When Big Nathan promotes Moshe from the role of enforcer, beating up the delinquent shopkeepers, to prizefighter, Moshe starts to come into focus as Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
A review of By This Time—Poems by Ian Ganassi
By picking out what was a random unnoticed cultural fragment and placing it before us, the poet is not presenting it as a truth but is assigning it value: this bit is worth paying attention to, he’s telling us, even though doing so yields no clarity and brooks no complacency.
A review of A Review of The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the origin of Animal Farm by John Reed
Once upon a time, authors’ lives were separate from their works. Readers took the written work from the page. Today, that is not the case. Life and art are inextricably entwined for public consumption. Often, I question the wisdom of this, but in Orwell’s case, it’s valid. Animal Farm is political, and it is reasonable to explore Orwell’s life in order to see the novel in context.