Emily Franklin’s debut poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here is an emotional exploration of the ways family and possessions become embedded in our consciousness, perhaps even lodged in our DNA. Our attempts to soothe the pain of inherited memories by “forgetting, mottling as salve/for the soul” are often fruitless because the “potholes of memory” make erasure impossible.
A review of Coolest American Stories 2022 edited by Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey
One of the coolest things about the thirteen stories that make up this collection and makes them legitimate contenders for the title is the sense of revelation that each embodies, whether it’s a poignant insight into love or suicide or your “otherness,” or even just the quotidian awareness of being hungry after watching a lion bite off your mob boss’s head, as in S.A. Cosby’s hilarious noir, “Pantera Rex.” Each of these stories has its moment, some more subtle than others, some more dire. (Look no further than the first story, Lori D. Johnson’s “Shepherd’s Hell,” if you’re looking for “dire.”)
A review of Sister Séance by Aimee Parkison
Parkison’s novel is quite chilling even with its slow buildup. The story’s pace means every chapter ends with either some new revelation or some progression towards something worse, and the rotating perspectives means creates dramatic irony that pays off with each new chapter. This allows the story to earn its more fantastic moments, as the realistic, recognizable horror permits for it’s absolutely wild climax.
A review of Bed by Elizabeth Metzger
Within the spare and taut words, the compact lines that the author fashions in her poetry are found grief, love, intimacy, spirituality, death, yet an emotional distance and mystery (lots of it). In fact, it is mystery that has kept this reviewer off-balance throughout the book, as in the lines: “Wind from nowhere / It did not get up / from its snoring carriage / or offer me a bottled / sense of the near future.” Her lines are simple, their meaning complex.
A review of The Breath by Cindy Savett
Savett’s incantations are strident and introduce recurrent images (clay, sparrow, dirt, twin). They function stylistically like the choral strophe and antistrophe of Ancient Greek tragedies, repeating phrases in a histrionic voice. As such, they deepen the tone of devastation and misfortune.
An interview with Gary Slaughter
The author of WWII POWs in America and Abroad talks about why he wrote his book, the often-overlooked perspectives of the 6 million people held in prison camps in the U.S. and around the world between 1939 and 1945, about what life was like for an imprisoned officer, about growing up in Owosso during WWII, classic movies, collaborating with his wife, and lots more.
Sumptuous Scrupulousness: A review of Hesitancies by Sanjeev Sethi
In “seclusiveness” he treats his bones of mundane aches and fills them “with the calm of calcium.” It is this myriad understanding of human hesitancies with all its aftermaths that are grappled by Sethi in a highly intellectual manner in this magnificent collection of poems that makes this book a treasure for the connoisseurs of poetry. A reader of this volume, if he or she makes the effort to go into the interstices of Sethi’s poetry, will experience time-capsules of life and do so in a more profound way that he or she has ever imagined.
A review of The Asparagus Wars by Carol Major
Compelled by a strong identification with Major’s experience of marriage and motherhood and a familiarity with the power structures that discriminated against her – remembering the marginalisation I’d faced as a single woman raising a child on my own – I came to the gradual understanding that my interaction with her work was almost wholly personal. My instinctive response to The Asparagus Wars, Major’s powerful recounts of gendered inequality, made it undesirable that I interact with the book in any other way.
A review of Knives on a Table by Peter Mladinic
This collection is a plethora of mixed emotions….Those of love, loss, living, and dying. Mladinic is a brilliant composer of the written word, of describing a feeling, an incident, a thought, and with the finesse of a fine master who cares deeply for his subjects. Add a bit of sensuality and desire, the frailty of the human mind and of human behavior, and the cruelty of death, and one has a window into the world of Mladinic’s psyche and his free verse poetry.
Unlocking the Door of Consciousness: A Conversation with Clifford Garstang about his newest novel, Oliver’s Travels
The author of Oliver’s Travels talks about his new book and his unique narrative style(s) and voices, his characters and their complex journeys, the books themes, his new work-in-progress, the joy of travel, and lots more.