Category: Women

Review: Echo Bay

4/1/2019

Transformation and Letting Go in the Las Vegas Valley
Review: Echo Bay

Kaitlyn Gaffney

Jennifer Battisti
Poetry
Tolsun Books, pp. 48
Cost: $10.00 (paperback)

In Jennifer Battisti’s first chapbook, Echo Bay, we meet a multifaceted and singularly articulate girl and woman, raised on the fringes of the Las Vegas Valley, navigating the complexities of memory with moving poetic detail. The speaker is at once enrapturing and unabashed, exploring adolescence, marriage, motherhood, and grief with both precision and universality. Through Battisti’s unique perspective, we examine the shaded, much less glamorous fringes of the Las Vegas Valley, just as we are presented with the much less idealized aspects of motherhood and marriage. Battisti’s profound work fosters an intensity of emotion which ranges from despair to joy to acceptance as the speaker searches for the freedom of letting go.

She waits...to scour out the marks--
her own choices, the only ones
she cannot abrade,
while longing to belong
to only the deep
wilderness of autonomy.
-Jennifer Battisti, “Kitchen Sponge”

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Review: Staircases Will Outnumber Us

8/1/2018

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A Synopsis Plants the Seed for an Otherwise Flowerless Tale
Review: Staircases Will Outnumber Us

Rebecca Rodriguez

Jessica Roeder
Flash Fiction Chapbook
Red Bird Chapbooks, pp. 40
Cost: $12.00

Jessica Roeder’s chapbook, Staircases Will Outnumber Us, requires much more from the reader than simply enjoying a beautifully written narrative. Throughout her compilation of twenty-one pieces of flash fiction, Roeder creates a world in which we find a blend of fairy tale and cult-like activity. We watch our narrator live among her nameless “sisters” in a treeless forest, where they bear children and build staircases made from stumps, always awaiting the daily return of their “father.” The reader is forced to discover what the treeless forest represents, and thus, the meaning of everything that follows.

Although we are told in the book’s online synopsis that “One thing’s for certain: we are in America,” there is nothing that makes it certain other than the appearance of sparklers in a chapter titled “Fourth” (representing the 4th of July). One could weakly argue that the “father” (a self-proclaimed “god of war” and “god of reason”) could depict our current president, but the sisters are not relatable enough to portray the rest of society as a whole. Then there is the sun, who, although mentioned several times, still withholds its ambiguous purpose. The synopsis gives an obligation to view the chapbook as political satire, thus biasing the natural apprehension of the reader. To be put simply: It cheated.

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Review: The Missing Girl

5/1/2018

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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.

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Review: Echo Bay

Review: Staircases Will Outnumber Us

Review: The Missing Girl

book reviews by glassworks editorial staff

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Review: Echo Bay

Review: Staircases Will Outnumber Us

Review: The Missing Girl

﻿book reviews by glassworks editorial staff﻿

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book reviews by glassworks editorial staff