Steven L. Peck’s Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of the Rats, winner of the Association for Mormon Letters’ 2018 award for novel, is at once whimsical and intensely meditative. It is cosmic in scope, yet profoundly intimate. In other words, it is full of paradox, the kind of paradox that leads the […]
If you’ve never been to Tokyo, or if you’ve never wanted to (but maybe you’ve wanted to want to), then Michael Mejia’s mimesis of the place is a small rapture to get you started. It’s a crucial book (and I mean crucial literally) that not only defamiliarizes the […]
When I picked up this slim chapbook my first impression was how pretty it is to look at. The cover art resembles a map. Not the newfangled digital kind that talks you over a cliff as soon as you let down your guard–an old-fashioned paper map with carefully […]
In the memoir An American (Homeless) in Paris, the reader is invited to la mansion of author Chris Ames, a tent pitched atop an abandoned golf course overlooking the bourgeois center of Paris. Having returned from a sabbatical year of travel after being extricated from French domesticity as a result of divorce […]
Jean Valentine, when once asked about the difference between a short poem and a longer poem, answered that a short poem was “like putting your face in icy water.” The water in Mike White’s Addendum to a Miracle, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in Britain, is indeed […]
Lance Olsen’s previous novel, Theories of Forgetting ( Reviewed in 15 Bytes 4/3/2014), relates how when Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty is above water it is typically experienced as a simple labyrinth: visitors can’t resist walking the spiral to the center and out again. In his new book […]
Moth & Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death, put together by Sunstone editor Stephen Carter, contains 46 chapters that range from as short as one page to as many as 20. There’s poetry, fiction, memoir, sermon, meditation, drama, prose poem, and illustration. The tone modulates through humorous, to mournful, to sentimental, to […]
Reviewed by Lis Pankl Trish Hopkinson’s most recent volume of poetry, Footnote, is a deeply personal tribute to her favorite poems, prose, music, and films. She takes references from these works throughout to extrapolate into her own subject, often responding to the creator of the text or to the […]
Lisa Bickmore’s new poetry collection begins with a lament for the lost art of penmanship: “I tap the letters out in fluent clicks,” she writes, “What corsair has made off with my lovely pen?” The Frenchified word “corsair” belongs in a bodice-ripper! If only the act of writing were […]
It’s an easy thing, in the bookselling industry, to give oneself over to hyperbole. This is not just because it is a business of sorts, and we want to sell books, but also, largely, because really good booksellers are always reading (always!), and after about five or 10 years […]
Thin Spines of Memory seems to me to be less an autobiographical work than a poetic discourse on the role of the past and recollection in every human life, any human life. Hers as author. Yours and mine as readers. And to the extent that poet Star Coulbrooke peels […]
In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2016, editor Junot Diaz praises the form of the short story for mimicking the fleeting nature of life. He says, “To me this form captures better than any other what it is to be human—the brevity of our moments, the […]
Just a day before I picked up Brooke Williams’ latest book, the nonfiction Open Midnight:Where Ancestors and Wilderness Meet (Trinity University Press), my wife, Chautel, and I had just returned from a long weekend spent in Boulder, Utah. We stayed at the lodge and made daily hikes into the Escalante Staircase […]
The first thing I read on opening Scott Abbott’s Immortal for Quite Some Time was that “This is not a memoir.” I agree. This book is, in my opinion, the world’s most perfect obituary. I’ve been reading them in the newspaper since my mother’s death in 1994, when I realized […]
by Richard Hedderman If for a moment you imagine language as a length of rope, a poem forms when you start tying knots in the rope and pulling them tight, snugging them and squeezing all the air out. The poet may then submit to the reader that his […]
Katharine Coles’ writing style is pared-down and precise. The former Utah Poet Laureate (2006-2012) often uses punctuation in order to minimize verbiage, and favors “erasures” to create new poems by eliminating words from an existing text. The effect can seem a bit chilly, though it set the perfect […]
