“The Flowers Along the Way testifies to the healing power of hope, showing how nurturing a garden, or a story, can generate something fresh and green out of loss.” (review by Liz Rios Hall)
Tag: book review
“It’s a lot more entertaining to hear a dolphin tell a manchild to ‘grow up’ than to hear the same advice coming from a psychiatrist.”
(review by Chloe Lutts Jensen)
An underreported story of the lived experience of children of political activists who embrace violence as a tool of resistance. (review by Karen Paley)
Mule Boy unfolds as a single, sustained utterance—a life in one long sentence—and in doing so invites the reader into an intimacy that feels both confessional and liturgical.
(reviews)
The title comes from Margaret Atwood’s poem “You Fit Into Me,” a borrowed line that helps Gaudry translate her own feelings. The phrase “fit into me” can act as both a plea and a demand, asking us to place ourselves inside the characters—but borrowed language can also act like a mirror, reflecting our own experiences back at us rather than revealing hers.
(reviews)
The often pitch-perfect language captures the absurdity of the way we live now and renders it hilarious: “I fought a monster and defeated it. I did that. But what do you do with that? It’s not something I can post about on Facebook. I mean, my mom would see that.”
(reviews)
The collection’s opening salvo asserts this tension in a whiplash, maximalist mad dash. Stories steer their readership past one visceral image after another: burnt oil engines, boiled feet, metallic screams, and fast food mutilations.
(reviews)
The book takes a historical view of global conflicts — namely World War II and the Cold War — and Lamantia’s reactions against the imperial war machine, both in the United States and within globalized systems, emerge as a precursor to the apocalyptic themes often present in Western poetry.
(reviews)
The poems in Naming the Rose draw from vulnerable, autobiographical elements mixed with the obliviousness of those around the speaker. The two-sectioned poem “The Light of Day” contrasts loving memories of pumpkin carving by the speaker’s daughter with the fear of the speaker-mother as her partner and the father of her daughter, “drunk,” “too drunk,” “rid[es] down the highway at 90 miles an hour” with “a huge stolen pumpkin on [her] lap.”
(reviews)
This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability.
(reviews)
