Category: Literature

Review: Pretend We Live Here

6/1/2019

The Art of the Uncomfortable
Review: Pretend We Live Here

Laura Kincaid

Genevieve Hudson
Fiction
Future Tense Books, pp. 168
Paperback, $13 US

Genevieve Hudson captures the comfortable in the uncomfortable. Her collection of short stories, Pretend We Live Here, centers on characters looking for home in places, in people, in their own bodies. No matter where her characters roam, readers are confronted with the violence inherent to existence through her sharp-edged but haunting, sometimes even joyful, prose.

Review: The Missing Girl

5/1/2018

A Little Goes A Long Way
Review: The Missing Girl

Elizabeth DiPietro

Jacqueline Doyle
Fiction
Black Lawrence Press, pp. 30
Paperback, $8.95 US

The woman running for her life from a man in a park. The girl who passes out at a party after a tainted drink. These are familiar stories we’ve been exposed to time and time again in the media. In fact, they’re so common they border on cliché. We’re under the impression there is nothing left to say, but there’s still, for a lack of words, fresh blood in these stories.

Jacqueline Doyle’s debut chapbook The Missing Girl features a collection of stories about the threats women face. From rape to questionable encounters, Doyle’s genius is that through her flash fiction pieces, she relies on our societal knowledge to fill in the blanks of her finely drawn bits of terror; and through them reminds us that for women nothing and nowhere is safe.

Review: The Expanse Between

4/1/2018

The Fiction of Privacy
Review: The Expanse Between

Joe Magaletta

Lee L. Krecklow
Fiction
Winter Goose Publishing
Paperback, $13.99

In Lee L. Krecklow’s debut novel The Expanse Between, he delivers a page-turner that will leave most readers unsure of what they would do by the end. It does an interesting job of introducing a commentary on the growing Internet, screen-obsessed culture. It takes place sometime in the mid-2000’s before this craze had really taken off, and in doing so shows that perhaps the human condition always had the impulses that the technology of today is making easier to appease.

Review: I'll tell you in person

6/1/2017

Are You Talking to Me?

Review: I'll Tell You in Person

Amanda Rennie

Chloe Caldwell
Creative Nonfiction Essay Collection
Coffee House & Emily Books: 184 pp.
Cost: $16.95

Some people seamlessly accept the maturity and responsibility that comes with adulthood. Some of us call our moms a lot. Some dig their heels into the ground with the resistance of a toddler heading to time out. Chloe Caldwell, by certain definitions, is the latter. Caldwell’s latest essay collection, I’ll tell you in person, includes lengthy but devourable essays about some of her craziest decisions, most obstructive and devastating problems, major disappointments, and the relationships that got her there.

Review: Songs for a River

5/1/2017

The Beauty of Nature and the Dullness of Man

Review: Songs for a River

Rachel Saltzman

Jerry McGahan
Fiction/Media - Stories
Knut House Press: pp. 241
Cost: $35.00 (full color edition)
$15.00 (black and white edition)

Songs for a River, McGahan’s third book, combines eloquent descriptions of nature, vivid artistic philosophies, and serene paintings of grazing buffalo in mountainous landscapes with a complicated romance that spans almost the entire novel. There is a Zen-like quality that carries over from page to page, inviting the reader to see art, nature, and relationships as more than just ordinary aspects of one’s life. But between the lovely portraits of wild North-West America, McGahan addresses the similarities between art, humanity, and the spirit of nature; although our pride as humans is to live and govern above the rest of the animal kingdom through reason and emotions, at our base nature we rely on the same instinctual tendencies as our hoofed and feathery counterparts. And even though we might consider ourselves beings of intellectual and artistic ability, it is difficult to push aside the lingering traces of animal ancestry along with the need to break free from societal restraints.

REVIEW: Lilith's Demons

2/1/2017

The Power and Punishment of Women

Review: Lilith's Demons

Sarah Knapp

Julie R. Enszer
Poetry
A Midsummer Night's Press, pp. 64
Cost: $14.95

Lilith. Feminist icon. Biblical nightmare. And now, the subject of Julie R. Enszer’s latest poetry book.

Lilith’s Demons, Enszer’s third book, reimagines the infamous, ancient figure Lilith as a modern, empowered woman. Split into three parts, the book begins with poems from Lilith’s point of view, followed by a middle section narrated by her demons (all with their own unique name and personality), and finally, closing with a short section narrated by angels who are drawn to Lilith’s alluring power. Through the eyes of Lilith and her demons, Enszer crafts a beautiful and thought-provoking narrative of the modern issue of women’s oppression, and the punishment they receive.

Review: Mouthful of Forevers

6/1/2016

An Appetite for the Insatiable
Review: Mouthful of Forevers

Gabrielle Lund

Clementine von Radics
Poetry
Andrews McMeel Publishing, pp105
Cost: $16.99

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.

Review: Three Great Lies

5/1/2016

Happiness Through Truth
Review: Three Great Lies

Patrick Murphy

Vanessa MacLellan
Fiction
Hadley Rille Books, pp. 347
Cost: $16.00

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.

Review: Stay

4/1/2016

Crafting the Courage to Stay
Review: Stay

Katie Budris

Kathleen McGookey
Prose Poems
Press 53, pp 77
Cost: $14.95

Kathleen McGookey’s words are brave. She begins her latest collection, Stay, with a quote by Gary Young: “The worst thing you can imagine is not the worst thing that can happen to you.” And yet, worse for McGookey translates to great for the reader. Her bravery comes across on every page, not as a battle cry or manifesto, but slowly, quietly, in the most unassuming way. The vulnerability permeating each poem is, perhaps, the bravest words can be.

Review: The book of Aron

12/1/2015

Review: The Book of Aron

Rachel Howe

Jim Shephard
Fiction
Alfred A. Knopf, pp252
Hardcover $16.50 US

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.