Mourning vies with exultation at every crisp turn of phrase and every crunchy, unexpected line break. Some of that mourning is for the earth, for its creatures, for human folly and ignorance, for the apprehended apocalyptic end of days. Mourning is sometimes captured in references to popular music hits — Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash always blaring out of cars of boys, and fathers who don’t know what to do with, without or about the boys — and sometimes in the symphony of stars, skies, space and otherworldliness.
An interview with Anahid Nersessian
The author of Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse talks about her latest book, the way in which her lived experience complicates her understanding of this canonical poet and the way in which she’s had a personal conversation with him about poetry and pain, activism and revolution, love and the sublime, on poetry and social movements, what’s exciting her in contemporary poetics, and lots more.
A review of HellWard: The English Cantos Volume One by James Sale
In HellWard we find powerful, often disturbing language, simultaneously raw and refined, beautiful and at times jolting in its honesty. What struck me particularly throughout the book is the way Sale uses mono-syllabic words to powerful effect: death, hell, pain, depth, weak, guts, ache, dark, gunk, blight, flesh, tears, stench, dread, blood, hiss, oozed,“clots of gore” (a wonderful image), cries, groans, filth, swill, “smelt the blood” (another wonderful image), skull, skin, bone, ice, heat, hot, bare, raw, mess, froth, “dark webs,” “hard knots”, guilt, “black holes,” blotch, stank, bleak, slop, “greed and pride and lust,” and “sick slime.”
A review of Tears of Amber by Sofia Segovia
Sofia Segovia uses interior monologue, an excellent technique for showing readers what goes on in characters’ hearts and minds. Sometimes, though, the time shifts in a character’s thoughts make the story hard to follow. In some sections it takes careful reading to distinguish between the recent past and the less recent past. Segovia could have put the wartime parts of the story in the present and the older characters’ memories in the past, but perhaps use of the present would have spoiled the story’s “once upon a time” quality.
A review of How to be Australian by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Of course every migrant’s experience is different, but Ashley’s story is one that’s both poignant and often hysterically funny. Like a Canadian Bill Bryson, she shines a light on the distinctive Aussie culture that locals take for granted, but also renders those quirks hilarious and also painful in a way that only comes with a kind of deep-seated observation edged with love.
Interview with Jess Corban
The author of A Gentle Tyranny talks about the inspiration for her novel, characters, and setting, writing for a YA audience, her research, themes, how she became a writer, and lots more.
A review of The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Though set in Naples, The Lying Life of Adults is not about friends rising from the slums, as in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Nor is it about the value of returning to one’s roots. Giovanna, the narrator-protagonist, who is twelve to sixteen during the novel’s time frame, is being raised in a progressive way by her middle-class, secular, intellectual parents.
A review of Vegan Junk Food by Zacchary Bird
The name of the book is, of course, a misnomer. There’s nothing junky about these recipes, which use high quality fresh ingredients, often made from scratch and generally, with only a few (worth it) exceptions, pretty healthy. However, Vegan Junk Food is not a book that tries to extol the health virtues of eating a vegan diet. Veganism is better for the planet and less cruel to animals, and that’s reason enough to eat vegan more often.
A review of Sonnets by Theresa Rodriguez
As both a poet and a trained classical singer, Rodriguez is more consciously aware of the musicality of poetry than most, and it is not surprising that other poems in this collection such as ‘The Piano,’ and ‘Oh, When I Hear,’ also take music as a subject. Most are of course not directly about music, per se, though all display the melodious qualities of regular meter and perfect rhyme.
A review of Theatrix: Poetry Plays by Terese Svoboda
Svoboda’s verse is playful, a true delight. As Alan Michael Parker writes in his Introduction in the style of an Introduction, “…give us voices, and their own inner voices, the ways we have made gender our playmates, and how we make our bodies the play. Then stand close, and watch the players play.