Deadheading and Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap
Reviewed by Mariah Rigg | June 14, 2022Red Hen Press, 2021Paperback, 232 pages, $22.95 Beth Gilstrap’s Deadheading and Other Stories is a love letter to the Carolinas, a collection that takes the much-documented recession and remakes it through the eyes of the Southern working class. As someone who did not grow up in North America, […]
Those Fantastic Lives, and Other Strange Stories by Bradley Sides
Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | June 8, 2022Backlight Press, 2021Paperback, 130 pages, $16.95 A method artists and photographers use for determining the worthiness or power of an image is to distill, in their minds or through photograph technologies, a color image till it becomes black and white or monochromatic. All distractions of color gone, and […]
The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss
Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | May 2, 2022Okay Donkey Press, December 2021Paperback, 190 pages, $15.00 The shadow of war—our collective guilt, its drifting, numbing effect even many decades later on all our lives—seems to this reviewer what Jennifer Fliss is writing about in her collection of flash fiction pieces The Predatory Animal Ball. The conclusion […]
Animal Disorders by Deborah Thompson
Reviewed by Torrie Jay White | April 26, 2022Black Lawrence Press, 2021Paperback, 102 pages, $19.95 “I would characterize myself,” Deborah Thompson writes in the introduction to her book of essays, Animal Disorders, published by Black Lawrence Press in September of 2021, “as having a fairly representative case of early-stage animal disorder.” The title is a […]
One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan
Reviewed by María Castro Dominguez | April 19, 2022Driftwood Press, 2022Paperback, 80 pages, $14.99 One Person Holds So Much Silence is an eye-ear-mind-kicking collection of nineteen poems divided into three sections: a body of poems that become disembodied and subsequently embodied by the reader who succumbs into its magnetic enchantment. As if following Roland Barthes’s […]
What Pecan Light by Hannah VanderHart
Reviewed by Christian J. Collier and Kasey Jueds | April 14, 2022Bull City Press, 2021Paperback, 68 pages, $18.95 KJ: Christian, I’m so happy to be talking about this beloved book with you. I’m struggling with the question of where to begin! It’s a question that often comes up when I’m beginning a review of a […]
An Interview with Leah Silvieus | by Hope Fischbach
Leah Silvieus is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Arabilis (Sundress Publications 2019), and is the co-editor with Lee Herrick of The World I Leave You: An Anthology of Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). She is a Kundiman fellow, holds degrees from Whitworth University and the University of Miami, and is currently studying literature and religion at Yale Divinity School.
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
Reviewed by Bess Cooley | March 22, 2022Graywolf Press, September 2021Hardcover, 288 pages, $27.00 Maggie Nelson isn’t unique in saying that the concept of freedom is complicated. And she doesn’t pretend that On Freedom isn’t going to be an ambitious discussion or a difficult conversation. From the beginning, she acknowledges the animosity of the word, […]
The Poet as God and Failure by Chris McCrackin
Chris McCrackin was born and raised on a small farm in Georgia and holds an undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University in English and Classics. Currently, he is pursuing an MA in Classics at the University of Georgia as a Beinecke Scholar and Osbourne Fellow. Currently, his academic and creative interests include indigeneity, disability studies, classical reception theory, and hybridity.
The Benefits of Not Knowing Your Audience by Jen Grow
Jen Grow’s work has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, About Place Journal, The Sun Magazine, The GSU Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review and many others. Her debut story collection, My Life as a Mermaid, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition. She was also awarded the 2016 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for her work as well as a Ruby Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore and can be reached at www.jengrow.com.