M.M. Wittle's creative non-fiction chapbook Three Decades and I'm Gone is her personal story of the author losing her father in her first decade of life, her mother in her second decade, and nearly losing herself to her grief in her third decade. The story is mostly written in a linear sequence of vignettes of prose poetry with some traditional stanza poetry. This treatment of memoir in a chapbook/poetry form gives the popular genre a compact, accessible feel. One can take the tragedy of each decade piece by piece and still experience the fullness of the story because each bit is an independent thought or feeling that supports the story as a whole. 

The Prologue, written in prose, is the memory of the family on a stormy night in which the then-six-year-old author and her twelve-year-old sister end up in their parents' bed and, ultimately, in a tickle fight with their father. It is an endearing look at the family before the father's accident and the mother's illness. The prologue also sets up the normalcy, including the safety and comfort of family that the author loses and will continually seek throughout the book and life. 

While the pieces, for the most part, are prose poems, there is little lyricism. The pieces, numbered with Roman numerals instead of titles, are more like extra-short flash scenes that communicate a thought, feeling, or idea through memories. Sometimes, there is a disjointedness created by jumping in time and place between vignettes, but it makes sense and fits with the theme of feeling disconnected from life and people and the author working through issues in therapy. 

An exception to the prose/poetry format employed throughout the work is poem XXIII. It is written in six stanzas of varied line length and recalls the lowering of the poet's mother's coffin into the earth and the ensuing week that covers it with snow. The author describes herself as "Not brave enough to turn back/and watch her final descent." She ends the poem by clearing the driveway of snow for her sister's return home and says that a piece of her own hair "whips around [her] neck/lacerating what remained of [her] life."  It can be less taxing at times for a memoir writer to communicate a particularly difficult time within the beauty of structured poetry instead of simply peeling back layers and exposing raw prose. Wittle manages the message in the structure quite well this way.  

Another striking element of this work, along with the writing, are the two photographs included. The first, numbered as vignette XXIV, says, "The only picture I have of my father and I" above it. The other 3/4 of the page is filled with a blurry black and white head-and-shoulders close-up of a balding man in a dark sweater with a little girl to his left. The photo is so washed out that the little girl's face is almost bleached away except the faint outline of her big toothy smile. The sadder of the two photos, vignette XXVI, captioned "This is the only picture of my mother and I," is another black and white image that contains no people. Instead, in the center of a grassy area is a flat gravestone partially reflecting sunlight and completely blurred. On the ground beneath the stone is the shadow of a figure of someone bundled in a coat. These two images beside the prose solidify the distance and isolation facing the author due to the deaths of her parents and the feelings of grief that haunt all of us who have lost a close loved one. 

At sixty-two pages, including acknowledgements, Three Decades and I'm Gone is a quick read. It is a chapbook to revisit often for a cohesive story written in interlocking moments and thoughts that are relatable to those of us who have ever wondered if our losses have made us outcasts. It is a book to pick up when you feel disconnected because you've stumbled into a desolation of loss and grief of any kind. It's the book that reaches out to say, "Yeah, me, too." There isn't just a universality in Decades, but a story that evokes sincere empathy in the reader that can be labelled as universality, but it surpasses that because it is felt so personally. As much as any of the poetry in the book a line in the acknowledgements best sums up the theme explored by Wittle when she thanks one of her friends "for sitting with me the night my mother died and for showing me death doesn't make me a freak." 

War of the Foxes (2015) is the long awaited follow-up to Richard Siken’s Crush (2005), published ten years ago, which won the Yale Younger Poet’s prize. It is a brilliant work full of questions and unearthing, looking both inward and around, projecting his battles through art, poetry, and the characters within them.

Most of Siken’s poems seem to be self-reflecting, riddled with abstractions and rhetorical questions. He yearns to untie “the knot of the self,” as quoted from his poem, “Glue,” looking at his own writing, his own art, his own life and mentality. It is soul searching in its finest display of craft. Profound attempts to answer profound questions. Siken could be questioning his own existence and his own method of life. “Why live a life? Well, why are you asking?” The very process of writing seems to be the answer to his questions.
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There are some cravings that can last a lifetime. If there is any evidence of this, it can be read in Clementine von Radics’ poetry collection Mouthful of Forevers. These poems separately challenge the reader to look at how they define love and how they heal from it. They make us question whether or not love is just one thing, or a mangled mess of emotion. Von Radics begs us to be raw with ourselves, to explore the types of love the world has to offer, traditional or not. She teaches us that the type of love we learn is the definition of love we bring with us, the love we challenge.

The path to happiness can be crooked and twisted with daunting barriers along the way. In Vanessa MacLellan’s debut novel, Three Great Lies, the key characters seek their own forms of happiness – only attainable when they recognize the truth about themselves.

MacLellan sets her tale in Egypt. Her bored and self-absorbed protagonist, Jeannette, decides to trust a local teenaged boy, to show her a newly opened tomb with no tourists. She survives a harrowing ride in a motorcycle sidecar to arrive at the site. Like Alice before her, she soon finds herself tumbling down the rabbit hole. Jeannette awakens from the fall and learns she is still in Egypt, but Egypt from 3,000 years ago.

“Dogland: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Dog Problem” by Jacki Skole, the term “Man’s Best Friend” takes on a whole new meaning.  Skole uses her journalism background and her love of animals to shed light on a topic that hits home for just about anyone who has ever brought a dog into their lives. It is during her search to find out the history of her recent four legged family addition, her dog Galen, that Skole begins to uncover something unfortunate: the truth that many dogs face once they arrive at a shelter and the urgent need for change in the animal shelter system. 

In his debut novel without anesthesia, Pedram Navab is able to construct a narrative with an intense urgency to connect plot lines and make meaning of his characters' obsessive practices to claim identity. The multi-genre narrative is structured with three major threads: Adrien, a doctor who falls in love with a cadaver; Tess, a med student desperate to connect with her patients and become the best doctor she can be; and a failing actor who desperately seeks an audience. While these threads interweave creating a cohesive story, a narrative in the background reveals itself as a symbol of each character’s identity struggles.

In terms of gritty, disturbing realism, Grand Theft Auto has nothing on The Book of Aron. Told in the straightforward voice of a child who understands harshness and guilt from the earliest age, The Book of Aron gives an unflinching view of life in the Warsaw Ghetto as well as what it was like to be a child of deep poverty in the years before childhood was deemed a special and protected space. It is a tale of modernization and industrialization as well as a Holocaust tale.

Novelist Jim Shephard tells the true story of Janusz Korczak, a Jewish-Polish doctor and educator who is heroic both for his revolutionary ideas of treating children with respect and dignity as well as for the work he did running an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, but he filters it through the eyes of one of the children he helped. When Shephard found Aron’s voice, a voice which has the cadence of a Yiddish curse, he found a way to tell a hero’s story while insisting the hero was quite fallible and quite human.

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. dares his audience to pontificate the world and relationships around them in his stunning work of poetry Scrap Iron. Written with a narrative voice, these poems are less like traditional poetry and more like beautifully detailed, deeply personal stories that explore the complexities of familial relationships and the desire to be elsewhere. Broken into three parts, there is a clear beginning middle and end to this book of poetry that is lacking in other similar works. Rather than leaving the reader empty and unfulfilled, the carefully comprised structure of this book ends with the reader left in a state of deep thought and satisfaction.