book review blog

Review: Not Flowers by Noreen Ocampo

| Rebecca Valley

NOt Flowers by Noreen Ocampo (Variant Literature 2022)

Reviewed by Jillian A. Fantin

Very infrequently does a poet arrest their reader in so few pages and with such a delicate touch as does Noreen Ocampo. Following her debut micro collection Teaspoons, Ocampo’s Not Flowers continues her exploration of the soft, the familial, and the power of memory. The poetry of Not Flowers reads with the serenity of a Studio Ghibli meadow combined with the timeless Victorian illustrations by Kate Greenaway, curating a fantasy-adjacent field of poetry combining memory and the senses. Nonetheless, Ocampo’s Not Flowers remains deeply rooted in the present, utilizing the power of sensorial memory to curate the speaker’s soft, loving contemporary moment. Ultimately, Ocampo disrupts the seemingly dichotomous relationship between being a flower versus a “not-flower” and finds tenderness and nostalgia to be elements of strength, rather than of weakness.

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Review: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

| Rebecca Valley

Disfigured: On Fairy tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc (Coach House Books 2020)

Reviewed by Katie Vogel

Within the first essay of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, I encountered a Joan Didion quote with which I am familiar. It is a quote that exemplifies what Amanda Leduc does in this book, which is as much an exploration of the ways that Western fairy tales reinforce and embody beliefs about disability and happiness as it is a retelling of her own story as a disabled person. It is a reminder that the stories we tell, why we tell them, and who is or is not included in them matters. 

The quote is: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

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August 2022 Reading Round Up: A Genre Fiction Buffet

| Rebecca Valley

It’s August! And we have three remarkably tasty reads that turn genre fiction on its head. This month, you’ll find short stories so delectable you’ll swear some passages came straight from the pages of cookbook. Plus, we’ve got a feminist Western to satisfy all your cowboy cravings and a book of literary science fiction full of violins, Faustian bargains, and donuts. Order up!

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Review: Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

| Rebecca Valley

Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (WW Norton and Co. 2020)

Reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean

“…her body was the only home/I cared about.”

Poet Marilyn Nelson has said “when you go to listen to a poet read, you leave having learned not only about the poet’s reality but also about the reality you are living.” She calls this “communal pondering.” Through Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ exquisite fifth book, Seeing the Body, we are invited into communal pondering about the physicality of grief, silence and absence, as the poet grapples with her mother’s death, its effect on the poet’s body and psyche, and the necessity of living beyond such a monumental loss.

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In the Gardens of Frida Kahlo and Vita Sackville-West: An Essay by Emily L. Quint Freeman

| Rebecca Valley
An image of Freeman’s garden

Written by Emily L. Quint Freeman

Freeman considers gardening as the ultimate art by discussing the notable gardens of two famous, queer woman artists.

Gardens are both art and autobiography, a landscape of self-expression combined with a love for natural beauty. As the great artist and garden-maker, Claude Monet, once observed, “I perhaps owe becoming a painter to flowers. My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

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Review: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black

| Rebecca Valley

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black (Notting Hill Editions 2021)

Reviewed by Melissa Greenwood

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg is an essay collection by Emily Rapp Black that follows two female artists for whom “create or die” and “laugh or die” are important mottos. These artists, Frida Kahlo and Rapp Black herself, live through their share of heartache. They know that art is survival, especially after several “crucible experience[s].” For Kahlo: polio, a “philandering husband,” miscarriages, and a street car crash that is followed by thirty-two operations, including one that leaves her an amputee. For Rapp Black: five surgeries during her childhood (a birth defect requires that, at the age of four, her left leg be amputated), two divorces, and the loss of her first child—her nearly three-year-old son, Ronan—to a terminal illness, Tay Sachs disease.

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Review: Requeening by Amanda Moore

| Rebecca Valley

Requeening by Amanda moore (ecco press 2021)

Reviewed by Leonora Simonovis

When members of a beehive are diseased—when their temperament changes or the queen is unable to lay eggs–– beekeepers use a practice called requeening, in which one queen is substituted for another to disrupt the current patterns in the hive and create new healthy patterns that will allow its members to grow and thrive. It is impossible not to notice the irony: the queen has an important role in keeping the hive actively developing and yet, once her “usefulness” has passed, she is discarded. 

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October 2021 Reading Round Up: More Than A Mystery

| Rebecca Valley

Everyone love a good puzzle–but in this collection of mysterious microreviews, there’s more to the story than just a carefully woven plot. These four titles take the mystery genre and use it to explore class, gender, race, and revolution. From a man who is searching for the literal woman of his dreams to the subtle tensions between two families–one Black and one white–in apocalyptic Long Island, these stories make you reconsider what the mystery novel can do.

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