hybrid reviews

Special Feature: A Cemetery Boys Found Poem

| Rebecca Valley

Healing

How long after he was gone would Yadriel be dreaming

The fullness of the family

they didn’t just take all pain

let people feel grief 

it was important 

to honor all those who make this community strong

“¡Mi querido!”

mourn 

loss of a loved one

Why

Growth isn’t a deviation 

growth is more 

a sphere instead of a line

This poem was created using quotes from the book and notes from our Drizzle Summer Book Club discussion. It was written collaboratively by Ingrid Carabulea, Rey Katz, Tracy Vasquez, Sarena Brown, and Rebecca Valley. You can find the writer bios here. To learn more about the book that inspired the poem, check out our micro review.

“Diary of a Book:” Review of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

| Rebecca Valley

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Gallery/Scout Press 2019)

Reviewed by Amy Spaughton

With a global pandemic and lock-down looming, I, like many others right now, depend on books to take me elsewhere. Anywhere will do; the past, the future, a completely new world… Books that travel through time and space allow us to understand our current world from a safe distance. Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie, however, shows us that escapism is not the only way out. This book follows Queenie, a young Black woman in present day South London, as she navigates her relationships to love, race, and mental health. 

I’ll admit, I was initially resistant. Being brought firmly back to my hometown of South London and to this particular reality felt harsh. But then the protagonist, Queenie, mentions things like Tumblr and Twix bars and it’s oddly comforting. It feels like reading a diary. Her unyielding and often comic honesty is as refreshing as it is poignant. In honour of this intimacy, I have decided to present my review as a diary. 

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(Inter)-Review: Ends of the Earth by Kate Partridge

| Rebecca Valley

Ends of the earth by kate partridge (university of alaska press, 2017)

Reviewed by Bianca Glinskas

 Walt Whitman once described a poem as, “a place to enter, and in which to feel.” While reading Kate Partridge’s Ends of the Earth, I experienced this profound sense of transportation, and emotional surrender–the escapism and vulnerability Whitman refers to. Ends of the Earth is a portal which delivers readers into a poet’s imagination: the inventive, intangible tedium of the poet’s inner-workings, which transform attempts to make sense of the world into an art.

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