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Sally Rosen Kindred’s third book, Where the Wolf, is a wood where a girl-turned-woman, a daughter-turned-mother, goes walking, searching for the warm fur, the hackles and hurts—past and future—inside her. These poems explore how stories—fairy tales, family memories, myths, and dreams—tell us, and let us tell each other, who we are, and what’s wild and sacred in our connections. From “the beast your mother made/ who scans hood and bed,” to the ghost-guard summoned by a child on the night her family fractures, to the teenage son who transforms into “beauty, his dread-body,” the beings in these poems are themselves stories, spells: alchemized through language, always becoming, bearing hope and loss. They fragment in anxiety, and form into new wilderness. They open themselves to reconstruction, redemption. Through it all, “Wolf is the ghost of a hurt remembering itself. Is She. You can hear Her between trees.” These poems are a calling out—through meadows, emptied houses, dark skies—to wolf and self, parent and child, girl and woman, love and grief.
Poetry. The poems in NO EDEN merge the landscapes of a rainy girlhood in the American South and the mythic world of Noah and the Flood. In these poems, a backyard stretches between a mother and daughter—the lessons of "distance tender and biblical." The Carolina yard opens to hold the fruits of Eve and Lilith, the flight of Noah's raven and dove, the small terrors of curbs and classrooms. These are poems of "a family awake through a storm," an intimate theology of floods, loss, and betrayal. But NO EDEN suggests a source of possible comfort, of slow quiet mercy and forgiveness. Perhaps there once was an Eden, even if it is no longer there. Its having possibly existed offers us hope that there may still be an Eden within, one we can somehow attain through beauty, luck and hope.
Part spirit quest, part inventory of what is loved and irrevocably lost to the elements, L. I. Henley evokes the exacting gaze of the California desert in her stellar collection STARSHINE ROAD. In L. I. Henley's STARSHINE ROAD, a collection set in the isolated, shifting Mojave Desert terrain of Joshua Tree, California, we are witness to the underside of a rural life near the world's largest Marine Corps base juxtaposed with hundreds of miles of national park. Traversing a land that could not be more real, but which often feels like dreamscape, these poems explore the dangers and treasures of one's birthplace: a dog and his homeless master, an infamous Amboy creosote, a junk pile, flawed cops...
The newest by award-winning author Hadara Bar-Nadav
"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.
In his prize-winning collection, Ron Slate seeks out the intersections of art, technology, and humanity with intelligence, wit, and fervor. His unique voice is informed by his world travels as a business executive. As Robert Pinsky writes in his introduction, Slate “brings together the personal and the global in a way that is distinctive, subtle, defying expectations about what is political and what is personal.” In Slate's words, "Is this the end of the world? / No just the end / of the language that describes it." Recently published in The New Yorker, Slate has been praised by James Longenbach for his ability to “make the known world seem wickedly strange — a poetry that is utterly of the moment, our moment, because it sounds like nobody else.”
Art. Literary Nonfiction. Stuart Williams had, in the words of his older brother Frank, "a mystical connection with animals." He dreamed of becoming a farmer, but having learned to draw at the age of six he became an artist, in his teens showing his work in venues throughout his hometown, Peterborough, New Hampshire. He traveled to Switzerland, the home of his beloved Toggenburg goats, and to Kenya, Tanzania, and the Serengeti plains. He read avidly about animals, domestic and wild, and watched all the documentary films on animals he could find. "Each of his drawings suggests," the Boston Globe's art critic Sebastian Smee has written, "an enviably deep, somehow magical identification with animals." Williams is that rare artist who worked under the constraints, physical and mental, of an incurable genetic disorder-Prader-Willi syndrome. He had the remarkable luck of being born into the right family in the right place, and he honed that with an art that transcended the impossible odds of his birth.
Clever, lush, and riveting, this sequel to The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic opens a new portal to a brilliantly realized world of enchantment, love, and danger.
The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside
Poetry. "ALMA ALMANAC is a stunningly original collection of poems about landscape, place, and memory. It is a lyrical scrapbook of skies, weather, stars, myths, recipes, rituals, and spells. From it, one can learn 'How to Haunt,' how 'To Preserve November,' and even find 'Instructions for Assembling a Bento Box Memorial.' In addition to the more traditional poems, the book is 'illustrated' with a series of short descriptions of objects, photos, and remembered sounds. These stark fragments, labeled and numbered like catalogue items, give a sense of the poet as curator, arranging, displaying, and creating her own museum of personal effects. Rather than narrating what they're supposed to mean,...