Book Review
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So Long the Sky by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes examines what it takes to make a life in a new place through the personas of Russian and Polish immigrants.
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In Sarah Lilius’ GIRL (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), the girls carve out pieces of themselves in a world of harassers and violence, in a world of Trump.
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The advent of movements like Me Too, Black Lives Matter, the Never Again student efforts against gun violence, and others speak to inevitable and necessary backlashes against misogyny, inequality, corruption, and violence. These movements are reminders of the widening cracks between what’s long been tolerated (and in many cases accepted) and the reality of what
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The poems in Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s book Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017) remind us of the intimacy of discovery.
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Kristin Sanders’ “Cuntry” (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017) uses the lens of country music to depict female sexuality and desire.
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Blurring the Edge of the Tiniest Things: A Review of Ivy Alvarez’s “The Everyday English Dictionary”
In Ivy Alvarez’s The Everyday English Dictionary (Paekakariki Press, 2016), each stanza has a header word preceding it (like words in a dictionary), and the words are not everyday words: they are quite challenging. One might deduce that these words would probably need to be looked up in a dictionary. And yet, the stanzas oppose the
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Heidi Czerwiec’s haunting new book Conjoining (Sable Books, 2017) focuses on the myth of mothers as monsters.
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Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s collection Malak (Platypus Press, 2017) creates a new language that helps us understand the metaphysical, the things we cannot see.
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Enikő Vághy discusses themes of heritage, trauma, survival, and inherited memory in Ruth Awad’s ‘Set to Music a Wildfire’ (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017).
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Jennifer Tseng’s “Not so dear Jenny” (Bateau Press, 2017), the winner of the 2016 Boom Chapbook Contest, is born from a 30-year correspondence with her father. These poems are intimate missives on parenting, longing, and heartbreak.
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Marlena Chertock’s collection “On that one-way trip to Mars” (Bottlecap Press, 2016), contemplates the beauty on the earth and in the universe and how quickly it can dissipate if we aren’t careful.
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Megan Merchant’s The Dark’s Humming (Glass Lyre Press, March 2017) speaks to the maternal experience in the most intimate and real ways: its joys, fears, and the eternal, overwhelming responsibility.
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