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 […]
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 […]
