“The forest wears perfume. You’ve smelled it: sun-baked pine, heady as fresh bread. Forest dresses stout in summer, all kinds of layers. Then she strips naked in winter—the opposite of people. Forest sings and sighs, moans and hums. Voices legion, connected millions: leaves in windblown tremble; gray-brown trunks hushed as soldiers, some kissed by sun, some drowned in shadow; rain whisper and thunderbowl” (32).
It is evident that Darrin Doyle, author of the book Let Gravity Seize the Dead has a deep appreciation for nature. He describes the outdoors with such detail and respect you feel that you are deep in the thick of it. He speaks of it with human-like qualities, as if it were a living, breathing person with a past and feelings. And while these aspects give the book life and beauty, Doyle’s novel also evokes a sense of eeriness that leaves the reader with a chill that is hard to shake even after the words on the page end. This chill gets even more sinister as past and present intertwine and weave a story that transcends beyond time, leaving us encased in these vivid descriptions of nature with the question: “why?”
0 Comments
It’s an interesting experience, being a Black woman. Traversing this world born as two marginalized identities, not receiving support from either at the same time. When standing up for ourselves we are painted as aggressive, too passionate, perpetually angry, the villain. The experiences of being a woman differ globally but there seems to be a consensus that being a woman entails some sort of suffering at the hands of patriarchal society. At least that’s how it is explored within white women’s spaces. Albeit true, when Black women come into these spaces to impart their own experiences being a woman coupled with being Black, suddenly we are shunned. Suddenly we don’t know what it’s like to be a woman because we are Black. What they refuse to realize is that our womanly experience is unique. It’s beautiful, it's painful, it’s joyous, it breeds community. This is explored within Angelique Zobitz’s poetry book Seraphim.
Author Jessie Van Eerden is not content to offer simple or comforting conclusions about faith; instead, she presents prayer as a practice that can be both comforting and uncomfortable, both a yoke and a feather. Her latest book, aptly titled Yoke & Feather, is an intimate collection of braided and lyrical essays that weaves together themes of spirituality, identity, and the search for meaning in the mundane.
The Salem Witch Trials are infamous in American history. Nineteen people in Salem were hanged after four young girls accused local women of witchcraft, and things spiraled out of control. Two of the most well-known people from this incident were 12-year-old Ann “Anna” Putnam, Jr., one of the original accusers, and her father, Thomas Putnam, Jr. No one will truly know what was going through their heads during this time, but Greg Houle tries to answer this question in his historical fiction novel, The Putnams of Salem.
Have you ever found yourself in the position of talking out loud to yourself all the while hoping some external force can hear you? Maybe there’s a motive behind talking out loud, maybe, just maybe someone or something is listening. In Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince delves into the deeply human desire to impose order on the world through knowledge. She combines science, mathematics, astronomy, and language as metaphors for our intellectual attempts to understand the universe. Yet, running through these poems is a countercurrent of chaos, reflected in her stream-of-consciousness style, which suggests that while we seek answers, both the cosmos and our own minds resist such clear-cut resolutions.
|
Archives
November 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
|
Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing 260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 [email protected] |
All Content on this Site (c) 2025 Glassworks
|
