Paisley Rekdal, who won the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry for “Animal Eye” (as well as an impressive number of other fancier prizes), has published a new book of poetry with the prestigious Copper Canyon Press. As with her previous books, Imaginary Vessels is sheer pleasure to read. Words […]
This chapbook documents a trip from Utah to Argentina in three brief chapters, each with a poem, an essay, a photograph, and epigraphs taken from the work of poet Pablo Neruda. The first section, “Punta Norte,” describes a wildlife preserve on the Península Valdés in Argentina which is […]
Some titles, like Many Things Have Happened Since He Died by Elizabeth Dewberry and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, have made me want to read a novel when I know nothing at all about the author and haven’t read a review. The title itself creates a sort of […]
Old age is a terrain most of us have not traveled. We’ve not been there before (and most people think they’ll never get there, either, keeping the reality, as well as the idea, at bay. Except, there are those times when a brush with old age cannot be […]
Michael McLane is the man behind the Utah Book Festival, which this month is bringing authors and book lovers together across the state. But he’s also a writer, and in this companion piece to our podcast on Trent Alvey, Amy Brunvand takes a look at McLane’s Elik Press publication Trace Elements: Mapping the Great Basin and its Peripheries.
Human identity can be said to rely on two things: who we are, and what we do. This being and action gives humans purpose. As a Mormon boy growing up in Utah, the knowledge of my ancestors and faith told me who I was, and what I was […]
When Willa Cather wrote a female protagonist and gave an impression of male-ness to the hard, western landscape of her novel, O Pioneers, she probably wasn’t trying to do anything radical. She was writing what she knew. Though perhaps she also meant the book to be a deliberate […]
by Ed Bennett The myth of Echo as we know it appeared in Book III of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” She was a mountain nymph, part of a group with whom Zeus liked to dally. Whenever Zeus’ wife, the goddess Hera, attempted to find her husband during these interludes, she […]
In his collection of essays called Good Water, Kevin Holdsworth says, “To find and frequent the periphery is imperative for the artist, and dangerous—the margin is a sucking whirlpool.” Could there be a place more marginal or peripheral than the small town of Good Water in Wayne County, […]
Nate Liederbach’s collection, Beasts You’ll Never See, begins: When our youngest sister went anorexic at twenty-nine her cheeks sprouted mold-white peach hair, her gums grayed, her auburn mane scraggled dull and spit clumps, yet we couldn’t mention it. A beast? The story is titled, “Daddy Bird.” And […]
by Meg McManama Joey Franklin, Utah author and BYU professor, is an average-Joe-Mormon who contemplates hilarious and poignant moments of boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. Franklin’s collection of 14 essays brought out the immature teenage humor in me, and at other moments had me meditating on the huge responsibility […]
Judith Freeman is best known as a fiction writer who frequently weaves Mormon themes into her stories. Her novel The Chinchilla Farm (1989) won an award from the Association of Mormon Letters, and Red Water (2002) centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Her latest book is a memoir […]
Author Shawn Vestal will read from and sign his debut novel Daredevils on April 27, 2016 at The King’s English, 1511 S. 1500 E. in Salt Lake City at 7:00 pm. David Pace reviews the work in our Sunday book review.
Craig Dworkin, a professor of English at the University of Utah, is a bright star in the avant-garde conceptual poetry movement. Conceptual poetry is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of poetry. Rather than using expressive language to explore the human condition, conceptual […]
I have long been acquainted with Nancy Takacs’ poetry through her beautiful chapbooks. Thus, it was a pleasure to read so many of her poems in her latest collection, Blue Patina, published by Blue Begonia Press. In these poems, I continue to see how deeply the natural world […]
by Nancy Takacs I am drawn to these truthful, soulful poems in Flicker. They are natural in their telling, in a voice that trusts itself, and is wise, although it doesn’t mean to be. The poet tries to transcend grief through repentance, to know what will work, searching […]
Susan Imhoff Bird’s new memoir, Howl: of Woman and Wolf, has all the depth, complexity, and moving power of that most haunting of sounds: the howl of a wild wolf. Alternately joyful and mournful, lyrical and pragmatic, this hybrid tapestry of memoir and wildlife historiography offers equally […]
