Gold Digger is a bristling invitation. A challenge and a call to attention. It demands an opening of the eyes and ears to lives lived vivid and vital despite the social context in which they are lived. This is a collection as galvanising as it is refreshing, and I congratulate Lisa and Gazebo Books on its publication. If you identify as a woman, you will feel seen in these pages. If you neither identify as a woman nor have spent any of your life socialised as one, prepare to have your eyes unpeeled.
A review of Alighting in Time by Lynne Wycherley
As her poetry and prose articles indicate, she is concerned about the little-known risks of the wireless boom and works to build awareness of the dangers. While her recurrent theme is the threat posed by modernity to the rhythms and solace of nature, her poems are not overly didactic nor depressing. They are uplifting and also reader-friendly; she includes footnotes to explain potentially unfamiliar terms.
Death and Desire: A review of Mother, Daughter, Augur by Mary Simmons
Often in this gorgeous collection, I found the theme of death to be that of decay: dead birds, dead spiders, pears rotting; the kind of death that winter brings. In the poem, “In the Small Hours,” Simmons writes of dead spiders, “their brittle petals,/their dull pigments/their spiders/in diapause, because in the belly/of the dead it is always winter.”
A review of Burn by Barbara Hamby
Hamby’s ideas flow like a person talking to herself, and we get to listen in. Her free-association stream-of-consciousness is exactly the stuff of dreams, as alluded to earlier, so it’s no surprise that so many of the odes involve dreams. “Ode on the Rilke Metro Stop in the Paris of My Dreams” is one (“In this dream we’re in Paris, driving around in a car, / which is a nightmare…”).
A review of The Voice of Blood by Gabriela Rábago Palafox
The Voice of Blood is an eye opener. (A vein opener, too.) Read this book and you will fly with Quetzalcoatl, in a Cinco de Mayo replete with myth, fable, monsters, and current events. The illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada accompanying each story, are nothing short of outstanding: stark engravings, appropriately stylized, of winged creatures, witches at the stake, demons.
A review of The Drop Off by David Stavanger
The Drop Off takes these notions of play, irreverence and art, and utilises the tools of poetry – redaction and silences, puns, the language of public discourse, rhythm and structure to lead the reader, almost by stealth, into sudden moments of intense vulnerability.
En Busca del Tiempo Perdido, a review of Indifferent Cities by Ángel García
Indifferent Cities raises compelling questions about the nature of family, of generations, of how we may reach a point in our lives when, regardless of whether our parents are living or deceased, we become, psychically, parents to our own parents and perhaps also children to our own children. Indifferent Cities, in inspiring the reader to consider these paradoxes, is anything but indifferent. On the contrary, it is poignant.
Confronting Trauma with Resilience: an Interview with Molly Johnsen
Molly Johnsen talks about her debut poetry book, Everything Alive, her poetry journey, the devastating car accident that the book centres on, her use of dark humor, epilepsy, grief, trauma, parenting, love and lots more.
A review of A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Schartz’s prose dazzles as we accompany Joe on his sleuthing. Early in the novel, he considers people seen from his apartment window: “Lots of people looked respectable, but weren’t, and how did I know this? From childhood, somehow. And what did respectable mean anyway? For all I knew I’d spent time in prison.”
A review of Outliving Michael by Steven Reigns
There’s a great deal of nostalgia in Outliving Michael, of course, remembering a friend who died a quarter century ago, but Reigns is also remembering his own youth, with that same sweet nostalgia. Michael has gone shopping for jeans at the mall, the occasion for Reigns to make this observation about the immortality of youth.