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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
