Reviewed by Michelle Mitchell-Foust
Where to begin? Some novels, upon first reading, begin a return.
The return I make when I read Maryse Mejia’s Northwood unravels as I keep reading. I am driven to return to a place and time, to a person, not merely to remember. And I am driven to “answer” the novel….
One “answer” to the novel Northwood is a return to a bundle of leaves, a bundle of love letters.
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Reviewed by Katie Centabar
Every once in awhile there is a book that makes you giggle, flush with embarrassment and curl your toes. I remember them from reading as a teen. Specifically, Sarah Dessen whose books always promised a teen new in town who 1) meets someone who is misunderstood, 2) experiences a traumatic loss and must start over, or 3) both – and drama and hilarity ensue. Jasmine Guillory writes those books for an adult audience.
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Reviewed by Aaron Scobie
There is a woe filling in the white space of these pages. A woe spoken incredibly soft. Who Killed My Father is a short memoir by the French writer Édouard Louis. Simultaneously literal and metaphorical, the book approaches the unique and distant relationship between Louis and his father.
Continue reading“You apologized. These apologies are a new thing with you, I have to get used to them”
Reviewed by Maayan D’Antonio
17-year-old Ari Helix is a refugee who has no impulse control. So when she sets off alarms she shouldn’t have on Heritage, a spaceship that belongs to the tyrannical Mercer Company, she and her brother Kay escape from the ship and hide on Old Earth, now a desolate planet. But when Ari pulls Excalibur from a gnarled tree, she unknowingly sets into motion a new cycle of the King Arthur legend. A cycle she doesn’t know has anything to do with her.
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Reviewed by Rebecca Valley
I know many writers obsessed with houses. Houses contain us; we fill them up with ourselves. We share them with our families, lovers, histories, ghosts. In poetry, stanza is another word for room – this makes each poem a house, a self-contained world of its own.
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Reviewed by Gregorio Tafoya
“1. Lack of Interest in Your Baby”
So starts the quietly explosive “Ten Warning Signs of Postpartum Depression”, a thick middle piece to Polly Rosenwaike’s short story collection, Look How Happy I’m Making You—best said in a sleep-deprived, low, gravelly tone.
Much like the characters in Polly Rosenwaike’s debut, I feel wholly inadequate and ill prepared for the task at hand. They are entrusted with the nobler task, that of motherhood, and I, a male with no child rearing experience, am attempting to review their explorations. When I get sentimental about fatherhood aspirations, it is always the highlight reel of playing catch in the backyard and teaching the finer points of auto mechanics—a concept I hardly have any grasp on. The scenes in Rosenwaike’s book are far from the highlight reel of any parenthood.
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Reviewed by Rebecca Valley
“’Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here,’ my mother used to tell me when I was still a child. ‘Transparent things, fragrant things… fluttery ones, bright ones…” (3)
In her essay “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” author Kate Bernheimer defines the fairy tale for a contemporary audience – what fairy tales are made of, what doors they can open.
Continue reading“With their flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic, fairy tales hold a key to the door fiercely locked between so-called realism and nonrealism, convention and experimental-ism, psychology and abstraction. A key for those who see these as binaries, that is.”
Reviewed by Michelle Mitchell-Foust
To hold a forest dear is easy in Oregon. Where I live, forested land preaches the tenacity of growth, overgrowth, understory. Scented speech, the call and response between plants and plants, and plants and animals, is everywhere, almost terrifying in its abundance. One might say that the forest remains the third terrain of my life, after field and desert. And in its arms I have been fighting the loneliness that comes from a years-long absence of poetry, or rather, my own lines of poetry in conception. Or perhaps I have been listening to an overabundance of words that I can’t place. Regardless, this is not an even exchange–forest for poem-making–but the cursive of branches and the color of eccentric miniature often make the poems of my days. For the time being, searching the characteristics of the smallest visible life is the sublime.
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Reviewed by Hannah Wyatt
A couple of weekends ago, while wandering through the statuesque dinosaurs and food trucks of my new city, I picked up a $1 copy of Jana Prikryl’s The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016) at a tent sale hosted by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. This being my first read of Prikryl’s work, I was delighted to find that, within the first few lines of the collection, I felt I was reading someone who cared about the world I care about.
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