In the tiny pioneer outpost of Vernon, Utah in the West Desert south of Tooele author John Bennion was born and raised. Little has changed there since the time this fiction writer and professor of English at Brigham Young University lived there in the ’40s and ’50 and […]
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I wish Faulkner had lived and anxiously dreamed and feverously wrote his visions from the Utah/Mountain/Desert / Mormon/West” (instead of the South) then Before Us Like a Land of Dreams (Torrey House Press) by Karin Anderson is what you’ve been waiting for. Trailing a […]
“If a piece of paper gets into my house for a day, I’ll save it forever,” writes Klancy Clark de Nevers, oblivious of Marie Kondo’s warning about papers: “they will never inspire joy, no matter how carefully you keep them.” For de Nevers, these boxes of family ephemera […]
Nightingale is the fifth full-length book of poems by award-winning poet Paisley Rekdal, Utah’s current poet laureate and director of the University of Utah’s creative writing program. The cover features a stunning black and white image by New York artist Sara VanDerBeek entitled “White Nude.” Nightingale is published […]
In his introduction to Ellen Meloy’s Seasons: Desert Sketches, Doug Fabrizio, the host of KUER’s RadioWest, describes Meloy as “sassy and wise,” her writing as “funny and beautiful and almost always surprising.” Before Meloy’s untimely death in 2004, the Pulitzer Prize finalist and Whiting Award winner made regular […]
In James A. McLaughlin’s debut novel Bearskin, Rice Moore must choose to preserve his personal safety in anonymity or risk exposure by trying to catch the people responsible for the illegal killings of bear. The book is a plot-driven yet meaningful story of justice and redemption set in […]
After finishing Look Both Ways, I found myself recommending it to friends based on its ability to cause me to rethink imagination, history, and gender. It’s an imaginative book, self-imaginative. It’s a biography/memoir by Katharine Coles that centers on her grandmother, Miriam Wollaeger Link, and their respective journeys around the […]
The late Adrienne Rich once described her use of received poetic forms as “asbestos gloves” for handling difficult material. In Tacey M. Atsitty’s new collection Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press), sonnet, sestina, and villanelle surface amid prose poems, columnar incantations, a concrete poem with white […]
Come inside Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman and you’ll travel through a hall of mirrors. You’ll watch a young woman incorporate the timeless dramas of grief in a sideshow tent, reflecting richer gestures of love and loss in the distant center ring. You’ll see our narrator undone […]
Jack Harrell is not afraid to ask questions. In his newest work, Caldera Ridge, Harrell blends an impressive ability to create majestic setting and meaningful characters with questions that will keep you up at night. Does God know every decision that we will ever make or are there […]
“The natural world, particularly the wild waters of the west, have been deep balm for my soul. I’m deeply indebted to every stretch of water I’ve had the pleasure to fish.” This book is a gem of wisdom and interesting firsthand accounts from local author and U. English […]
In Desert Cabal, Amy Irvine hikes into the Sonoran Desert with coffee, liquor and a handgun to argue with a dead man. Published by Torrey House Press and subtitled “A New Season in the Wilderness,” it’s a narrative essay in 80 pages where the former professional rock climber […]
The Book of Sharks sounds like one of those fabulous fictional works that exist only in an author’s imagination, but in fact, Rob Carney has written an ambitious book of shark poetry that lives up to its mythological title. His piercing shark poems have been swimming into ecological poetry […]
George Handley’s debut novel, “American Fork,” artfully weaves together themes of religion, environment, memory, belonging, nation, faith, and loss with haunting prose and wonderful insight. This novel stands apart as a beautiful, well-crafted story with fully fleshed-out characters. The individual pains and desires of these characters invite readers […]
For those who want to open life’s envelope rather than pass it on sealed, you will find no better companion than Jana Richman. Her new book of essays, Finding Stillness in a Noisy World, provides soul food for end times. Couldn’t we all use a dose of soul […]
The Underwater American Songbook, Rebecca Pyle’s 2018 digital chapbook, is structured around a captivating and engaging conceit: the collection, as Pyle explains in a foreword, is “a body of almost-lyrics about objects found underwater all around New York.” Each of the 10 poems, therefore, focuses on some sunken […]
The epigraph to Lance Larsen’s new collection of prose poems is attributed to Paul of Tarsus: “Everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.” Evoked, of course, is the ever-famous notion of negative capability […]
