<![CDATA[GLASSWORKS - book reviews]]>Fri, 15 May 2026 19:36:29 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[Review: Sweeney as a Girl]]>Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.rowanglassworks.org/book-reviews/review-sweeney-as-a-girl
In The Eye of the Whirlpool 
Review: Sweeney as a Girl 

Adam Buckley

Jaki McCarrick
Poetry
Daedealus Press, pp. 76
Cost: €12.50 – €20.00
When people leave our lives, relics are left behind as testaments to their existence. These relics are often possessions of loved ones, sometimes stories observed or passed down, and other times, they are us. Jaki McCarrick’s debut poetry collection Sweeney as a Girl conjures a lived-in world via these relics, whether they're rooted in the history of her life, her literary muses, or her homeland.
The first poem, the collection’s namesake, sets the tone as McCarrick dons the visage of the crazed and exiled Irish king of legend, Buile Suibhne, as armor against the struggles of the modern world. In it are the concepts that the collection most often returns to: grief, story, and the beauty of Ireland. The lines “I hate its vacuous Facebook self / I hate its plagues and smoke and mirrors” make textual reaches towards issues such as social media and the Covid-19 pandemic, which conjure themes befit the titular King as an avatar for modern sources of modern isolation (lines 5-6).
These ideas orbit around the reader, giving one the ability to reach out and catch one on the second round if it passed them by on the first. The advantage to this tidal movement of the book’s themes is that they never overwhelm. Early pieces like “Role Reversal” tackle familial grief, and the penultimate, 5-part poem, “The Architect,” shows that the thread is carried throughout the volume in spirit, but forms often vary drastically. Its segmented structure, supplemented by a quote from King Lear as its epigraph, squarely pegs it as a reference to the Bard’s 5 act plays. “Role Reversal” discusses the reflected nature of a child seeing their parent on their deathbed, how the child now must take care of the one who has taken care of them their whole life, sporting a unique form in which the second stanza is the first stanza mirrored, ending as it began, but reflected.
When McCarrick picks a literary muse, these entries typically end up being the most enjoyable to me. Not only do I enjoy art about art, but McCarrick’s take always remained personal and grounded in the collection’s themes. My absolute favorite, “Caliban’s Island,” uses allusions to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to discuss the complexities of a relationship between an Irish woman and her British partner. The lines, “It was a working relationship. Neither he nor I could / duck or dive our differences, namely his theft / of this place, of which he’d the audacity to be frightened” see McCarrick’s history as a playwright come through as she, like in the title poem, takes on a condemned figure, this time Caliban, and conceives a mask of him, wearing his perceived monstrosity as armor (lines 1-3). What I love most about this piece is how it ties together all the themes swirling around this collection. McCarrick’s penchant for adopting literary identities manifests as a tribute to her Irish pride at the end, or death, of a relationship. If she must be a monster for living on this island, then Caliban she must be.
It pains me to say that poems about Ireland itself usually fell the most flat for me, somebody with a little bit of Irish in them. McCarrick’s language and description regarding the island’s hills and bogs and waves always proved authentic, like in pieces such as “Burnets by the Sea,” but as a non-local, I connected to character-focused works like “Home Ground,” which use Ireland and its place in history to reflect on its place in McCarrick’s life. The poem reflects on her upbringing in London, naming relics of the city like “the South Bank, St Martin’s lane, / the 98 bus, the delicious gust of air / you’d get down St. John’s Wood tube” in order to contrast the "notorious border town” in Ireland she finds herself in, “where alternative views of history can be found” (lines 2, 5-7, 14).
The secret fourth genre of poems in Sweeney as a Girl sees McCarrick as a witness, the relic left behind when birds take wing, months pass by, and memories resurface. These, too, connect to the collection’s themes—like “Migrants” making flock of swans the catalyst for recalling how an uncle died saving another boy from drowning. “The Spider” has us watching the delicate work of a silk spinner, all too aware that a human hand means destruction of its life’s work. What makes these pieces great is the tension between their often unassuming subjects juxtaposed to a feeling of death and destruction that McCarrick keeps lurking nearby.
Sweeney as a Girl puts the reader in the eye of the whirlpool and keeps us spinning around the elemental concepts of Jaki McCarrick’s world. I found myself swimming with it, going with the flow as I gravitated towards one kind of poem or another only to find it once again later, drifting my way. McCarrick has smartly put together a collection of punchy, impactful poetry that settles on you like a film the way it will stay with you long after you’ve resurfaced. ​
]]><![CDATA[Review: Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing]]>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.rowanglassworks.org/book-reviews/review-vanishing-points-words-for-disappearing
Changing the Tides on the Climate Crisis
Review: Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing

Sammi Grasso

Amy Kennedy
Micro Essays
Antenna Press, pp. 204
Cost: $16.00
Amy Kennedy’s Vanishing Points is like the dictionary every person needs on their bookshelf. For such a small print, every page packs a punch while equipping its readers with the knowledge and terminology to discuss and evaluate the climate crisis in a whole new light. A collection of micro essays, Kennedy's Vanishing Points takes the shape of an ecological dictionary that ranges from actual terms such as biosphere, confirmation bias, and greenhouse effect to concepts like boomtown and climate doom. It’s a six by six powerhouse collection that gives concept after concept without much room to breathe. Kennedy’s motivation seems to be: We can only fight against something once we learn the language to destroy it.
For being Kennedy’s first collection, she employs a strong voice through some of the microessays. In her essay “David vs Goliath archetype,” she says, “I hope more than anything that this is a David and Goliath story, that there can and will be a world that isn’t structured around corporate extractivism” (63). Here, there’s a stronger connection that is formed between the author and reader in that she directly calls out to us. It seems like she entrusts us as her audience to accept and even combine our aspirations with hers so that we become one recipient to all of the statistics and examples laid out. It shows us her own hopes, fears, and desires in regards to the future of the world in reference to the climate issue. 
She keeps her hope woven into her language across multiple of her microessays including in her essay “imagination (and fear)”. She describes the correlation between fear and how it activates the imagination in both positive and negative ways. However, she pursues the issue and offers the reader a more encouraging moment: “In order to turn back the doomsday clock– and I absolutely refuse to believe that we can’t– we have to imagine that it’s possible to do so. And we can’t do that if our imagination is paralyzed by fear” (103). After the onslaught of information both from the ground level and the theoretical ties that Kennedy sets up, these brief moments of reassurance and a belief in a brighter and stronger future are a welcome breath of fresh air. 
Anyone who struggles with footnotes or ‘see also’ sections may have a hard time working through the formatting of Kennedy’s prose. Seeing as a majority of her concepts connect and overlap and speak to one another, there are many moments where she will interrupt her prose and add a “see also” that connects to one or multiple other essays within the book. While the purpose is clear, the frequent influx of information may overwhelm readers, who might not yet fully understand the material or may feel pulled into jumping between texts before finishing the original essay. In tandem with this, Kennedy mentions that it’s important to read this book in sections rather than all at once, for even she recognizes how draining the content can be, so be sure to keep that in mind as you approach the text.
Anyone who enjoys reading and discussing the climate crisis issue on not just an ecological level, but political, racial, and class levels will love Amy Kennedy’s read. The micro essays are just that and fit so much information in a little 6x6 book. The decision to include images from different areas that are being affected are a good visual addition to her evidence backlog, and truthfully, more could have been included to show how widespread the issue remains. I find myself walking away from Kennedy’s collection with new ideas and a deeper appreciation for the scientists and environmentalists on the front lines trying to fix our planet before it’s far too late.
]]><![CDATA[Review: Homing]]>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.rowanglassworks.org/book-reviews/review-homing
Setting is a Literary Weapon
Review: Homing

Samantha Szumloz

Alison Hicks 
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions pp. 96 
Cost: $16.00 
The past can fill the soul with sweet nostalgia, but it can also fill the mind with memories it would rather forget. Alison Hicks’ latest poetry collection, Homing, is a treasure trove of recollections brimming with the brightness of childhood, the solitude of being an outsider, and the beauty of creation in all forms. Through natural and man-made environmental themes, Hicks soars across planes of joy, loneliness, and womanhood by constructing scenes that not only help readers ponder the mysteries of our habitats, but also the mysteries within ourselves. 
Hicks, a past Glassworks contributor, is no stranger to poetry, as Homing is her fourth published collection. She has dedicated her book to her husband and son, respectfully called “the archivist and the naturalist.” This attribution is a perfect transition into her body of work, which deals with the natural world, our man-made world, and their connections to our lives.
Hicks’ style is a blend of free verse poetry that combines concepts like nature’s bounty with dreamy-like reminiscence, fabricating a pipeline that takes readers through the simple, yet counterintuitively complex, beginnings of a writer. In her poem “Gifts of the Mediterranean,” she writes about a childhood beach vacation, recalling her parents’ words about Poseidon’s wrath and Athena’s generosity, correlating their characters with the raging sea and the olive tree:
Poseidon struck a rock with his trident and water came out.
Athena planted an olive branch.
Her gift deemed the more valuable.
Maybe one reason Poseidon was always getting angry. (13-16)
The notion of Poseidon’s chaos and rage foreshadows what is to come in the following poem. In “Euston Station, 1965,” Hicks tells of her father’s departure to Dublin through verse: 
The glare stays in my eyes when I look down:
my hand in my mother's flow of travelers around us.
The train waits, a stretched-out animal, painting, curving out of sight.
My father is going to Dublin (2-6)
The poet’s method of storytelling through verse is extraordinary, pulling from monstrosities and mythologies to get her childhood fears across.   
Hicks is a goddess at utilizing tangible, familiar environments (and objects) in her writing to amplify profound thoughts and states of being. This aspect of her poetry shines in her second poem, “The Party,” which puts our everchanging identities in conversation with the identities that people think we embrace. She writes:
No mystery we are a mystery to ourselves,
bottle we cannot drink from, only pour for others,
track the play of florals, musk, and fruit
​in animation of faces and voices (1-4)
Her way of lacing situation with metaphor creates an atmosphere that goes beyond the written page, a feeling of the self that turns self-reflection into an external process, turning her words into nuggets of understanding that readers can cling to.
Not only are Hicks’ words gorgeously human, but they are also deeply relatable. Homing is an exploration of the self, of childhood events and how they connect to our present states of mind. It is a journey that twists and turns through like life. As Hicks states in “Place of Seasons,” “I’ve stretched my body out on the Canadian Shield. / I’ve lost the trail many times, then found it,/ or maybe another one” (lines 13-15). We lose and find our own trails, time and time again, through the art we express.
]]><![CDATA[Review: We Never Took a Bad Picture]]>Thu, 01 Jan 2026 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.rowanglassworks.org/book-reviews/review-we-never-took-a-bad-picture
Grief: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
Review: We Never Took a Bad Picture

Megan Nielsen

Ashley Roth
Fiction
April Gloaming Publishing, pp. 284
Cost: $19.99
Grief is a part of life that every single one of us has to deal with, in ways big and small, yet no one seems to know how to talk about it. Grief is heavy, and putting it into words is no small task. However, author Ashley Roth takes on this duty with grace and nuance. Her debut novel, We Never Took a Bad Picture, recognizes that mourning isn’t a linear process by using a non-linear narrative and showcasing how much space grief takes up at different points in the main character’s lives. Roth shows readers that coping looks different for everyone, and that these processes can just as easily push people apart as they bring them together. 

The novel follows the lives of the Joyces, a multi-generational nexus of complicated relationship dynamics. The book builds up to the 55th anniversary party of the central characters Artie and Gloria. As the family prepares for the party, as well as Artie’s retirement from the grocery store he’s been working at since before they got married, we learn that their relationship isn’t perfect, and neither is anyone else's.
To showcase this, Roth bounces back and forth between the present day (2018) and the years that Gloria and Artie’s relationship first began to bud (1958 and onward). The nonlinear narrative serves this piece far better than a traditional chronological approach would have. Readers are afforded glimpses of the Joyce family’s dysfunctional present, immediately followed by pieces of the past that work to explain their current behavior. This allows for a deep understanding of each and every character, and an emotional connection to the family as a whole. We want them to treat each other better; we want them to heal. Yet, we watch them wrong each other over and over again in the same ways because they’re human, just like us.

Another function of Roth’s nonlinear narrative is that it shows readers that grief is cyclical. A key point of grief for the Joyce family is the death of Teddy, Artie and Gloria’s only son. His death occurred in 1988, and everyone who knew him mourns him over and over and over again. Even in 2018, 30 years later, his family still can’t settle the different ways in which they cope. When planning their anniversary party, Gloria sorts through pictures with her daughter, Autumn, while the two of them attempt to convince Artie to let them display Teddy’s pictures:
“‘About the pictures I want up at the party. I want pictures of Teddy.’

Artie shut his eyes, so he wouldn’t have to look at her. They’d had an agreement. He wouldn’t rattle her grief, and she wouldn’t question his avoidance. That was their compromise. Silence. No questions. Swallow whatever they disagreed with. They weren’t supposed to splatter the past everywhere. 

‘We can’t just let him die.’ Autumn’s voice quivered. 
He opened his eyes.
‘But he is dead.’ It was a logical statement, and he said it with logical precision” (167).
The scene above is an example of how the nonlinear structure also affords readers the opportunity to experience the same grief that the main characters do. In flashes of the past, readers become attached to Teddy as he’s described through the eyes of all who love him. We see him through Gloria as a gentle and doting son. We see him through Autumn as a little brother, bursting with poetry and potential, and inspiring her to be better through his idolization of her. We see how, despite their frequent disagreements, Artie still loves his son and wants the best for him. Through this lens, we come to love Teddy just as much as everyone else does. Then, the time period switches, our comfort is ripped away, and we are met with the bleak reality that every other character faces: Teddy is dead, and there’s nothing anyone can do to make that better.

Although Teddy’s death is the main point of mourning for the book’s main characters, each character has their own personal failures that haunt them. Gloria mourns her failed marriage by idolizing the past, despite knowing that it hadn’t been good then, either. Artie mourns the imminent loss of the only job he’s ever had, and the purpose it was able to give him that he felt he was missing at home. Autumn mourns her own failed relationships and the time she wasted on each and every one of them. These individual struggles make their shared grief even harder to handle, as none of them shares these heavy burdens. They handle them alone, scared of the vulnerability that connection can force. 

Overall, We Never Took a Bad Picture has a hefty emotional core, carried by the complex characters that readers follow throughout. Each of them showcases the many ways that grief can appear and how one can only begin to heal when they acknowledge the pain. When the Joyces begin to reconnect with each other and discuss their grief, the years of hurt begin to shed, and only then can they begin to fix what’s broken. This book is a beautifully human read, and finishing it invited me to reflect on the grief in my own life.
]]><![CDATA[Review: Child of Light]]>Sat, 01 Nov 2025 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.rowanglassworks.org/book-reviews/review-child-of-light
The Importance of Breaking Form Conventions
Review: Child of Light

Cecilia Combs

Jesi Bender
Fiction
WHISK(e)Y TIT pp. 3340 
Cost: $18.00
Jesi Bender’s Child of Light is a masterclass in narrative in-betweens. Bender writes beautiful, evocative prose and descriptions that are both startling and disturbing. The story is both narratively complex with several throughlines, and deceptively simple. The novel follows Ambrétte Memenon, a thirteen-year-old young woman moving with her family to Utica, New York in 1886. Ambrétte herself is imprisoned in a twilight land of “in-betweens.” For instance, her father only speaks French, her mother and brother are bilingual, and she only speaks in English. The book uses the main character’s feelings of being trapped between two words to launch into experimentations with structure, perspective, and language. The form of the book is both a testament to what novels can accomplish and breaks all conventions with a reckless abandon
In the story, Ambrétte’s family is divided between secularists and spiritualists, and this divide blossoms to encompass logic and faith, progress and the past, and light and death. This creates another straddling of “in-betweens” for both Ambrétte and the reader as they navigate these dual perspectives. The book also adds to the importance of this debate by connecting it to the treatment of women at the time. Through Ambrétte’s mother’s character, it is implied that women are more likely to believe in spiritualism because it promises them another world of sorts, as well as an escape. This interpretation of the concept has a fascinating pay-off in the end of the book, and it does interestingly negate the trope of the disconnected and frivolous spiritualist. I do also appreciate that the “seances” in the book are different from the archetypal ones in most fiction, involving elements that actually do succeed in making it feel otherworldly and strange instead of trite. 

The novel is able not only to discuss the themes of spiritualism and secularism within the prose and characters’ dialogue, but to utilize form to bring the reader into these conversations. The text breaks genre conventions often to disorient and also to fascinate the reader, similar to the emotions Ambrétte feels while researching the occult. The breaks in convention also dabble in the lack of understanding of her French heritage and language. In this way, it further emphasizes her isolation and lack of reliable education. This, in turn, emphasizes the mistreatment and lack of proper education for women. 

One example that summarizes all of these things can be found on page 19, which has two columns side by side: one is a short story in French, and the other is that same short story told phonetically. The short story, upon translation, is about women characters feeling intellectually trapped and forced to violence. However, without an understanding of French, like the narrator’s lack of understanding, this information is lost to the reader. The columns both devolve then to only be music notes. All of this helps the reader to feel the confusion and loss Ambrétte feels, as she is listening to her mother’s mournful piano playing. Just as Ambrétte does not understand that her mother behaves the way she does because she feels trapped and isolated, neither does the reader. This implication of violence and familial abuse puts a seed of anxiety in the French-speaking readers' mind that Ambrétte does not have, leaving the reader more aware of her vulnerability and giving them a sense of dread. When one can’t read the story, they may be as shocked as Ambrétte later in the text.

The breaks in conventional storytelling are also represented as an escapism or conduit for the female characters’ feelings. Often, though not exclusively, the breaks in form are there to make way for a woman to express herself—whether through the songs sung by the mother or short stories told by Ambrétte, Celeste, or Lizzy. When the female characters often give advice or a solution to their pain, the story breaks from the conventional prose form to make space for their diegetic information. This is not to say that male characters’ thoughts or worlds are not present in the form breaks, but it is more common for the women characters. Additionally, the tone of the text aligns with the female characters' experiences. The novel’s tone is often so grim that reading it makes you feel physically heavy. The word choice for certain scenes can be viscerally disgusting. This tone helps to emphasize the women characters who suffer due to societal systems, the choices of their male counterparts, and sexism, racism, and classism. Spiritualism is situated as a balm to this treatment by offering an escapist fantasy of life. The breaks in convention pattern further enforces the theme of spiritualism or fantasy as a tool for escapism by distancing it from traditional and linear narrative.

Another example of Bender’s informed use of form can be found on page 181. This page also utilizes the two columns and the French language to mystify and hide information. Knowledge of French reveals one character may in fact be hungover, but without it, the character’s reflections are unreadable similar to how the character’s mental state is unknowable to Ambrétte. The other side, in English, is more readable, which mirrors how Ambrétte is beginning to understand her mother and her struggles. As Ambrétte grows from a child into a woman, she can understand and relate more to her mother as she is also trapped and failed by society. Additionally, her French improves, indicated by the partial translations added in tandem to the French within the book. The partial translation helps to include the French, but allows the audience to feel discombobulated even as Ambrétte grows. This helps the audience to be narratively very close to Ambrétte, but not privy to all the information that the characters and setting have. This propels the ideas of the danger of the lack of education because by the end of the book, the behavior of the characters ends up totally unmoored from reality. The intentional distancing of readers from the characters’ actions through a language barrier adds to the bafflement and horror felt at the end of the book. 

All of these techniques to draw the reader into the confusion and unknowable nature of the character’s situation heighten the tone and themes of the piece. Pairing this with spiritualism, a cultural movement based in confusion and misdirection, is well done. Additionally, the later discussions of mental health and the institutionalization of women who don’t conform also blend with the non-linear storytelling. Crucial plot information, character details, and other information is not always told linearly. Often, it’s broken into pieces, told in flashbacks, or told in short stories or French excerpts. This results in a generally satisfying weaving of the present and past within the book, which led to some truly fantastic pay-offs. Some readers, however, may find it confusing. Elements of the text that might have been able to just be stated can feel muddled. In other words, a lot of the elements that make the story interesting, also make it challenging to read. Readers who enjoy puzzles and piecing together parts of a text will enjoy this novel!  

Child of Light allows the readers to experience reality in a new way, the way the main character does. This is not always a pleasant experience, but it is always enlightening. This allows the readers to exist temporarily in 1886 New York to marvel at the splendors and horrors of the day. It also means that the audience, like the main character, is able to traverse two complex themes. They are able to live in a mystifying, horrifying, grief-filled place where certain people are denied care, rights, or education. Then they can enjoy a world that is not only beautiful, but also full of mystery, light, music, and opportunities for self discovery and growth. Bender’s choices allow the reader to feel the extremes of both those themes, and to reflect on the two competing ideas. When her audience remembers they are living in this world, a place of contradictions, they will have new tools and ideas to help them navigate it. 
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