Book Review
The Year of the Femme
Elusive, elegant, and meditative, the poems in Cassie Donish’s "The Year of the Femme" resist traditional narratives, opting instead to accrue meaning by way of juxtaposition and repetition of language and images. Rife with nature and...
Book Review
A Body in the O
One of the NEA Four, performance artist, teacher, and writer Tim Miller believes that “solo performers are first responders” who move into the political fray, making the personal political and using their own lives as fodder for...
Book Review
Then It Fell Apart
“This shallow, diarrhea-splattered horror was my actual life,” writes Moby after a particularly brutal night out. In "Then It Fell Apart", Moby, the once globally famous musician, picks up where his first memoir, Porcelain, left off,...
Book Review
Museum of Stones
In Lynn Lurie’s "Museum of Stones", a woman experiences parenting as a cross between profound love and constant, only sometimes low-grade terror. Swinging between the past and the present, the novel moves from the mother’s rough...
Book Review
Blossoms
"Blossoms" is a straightforward and youthful collection of poems. Sixteen-year-old poet Hridam Saha’s "Blossoms" was written to delight young readers and collects both his earliest poems and his current ones. Direct and accessible, the...
Book Review
The Gifts We Keep
In her novel "The Gifts We Keep", Katie Grindeland layers revelations over misunderstandings to spin a complex and ultimately unsustainable web of secrets between a family, their neighbor, and the ten-year-old girl who comes to stay with...
Book Review
God's Will and Other Lies
“[T]here was so much hurt and pain and fear and sorrow … that I needed more than one kind of song to sing,” says one of Penny Mickelbury’s characters in God’s Will and Other Lies. Here a cacophony of voices sing, spit, and...
Book Review
The Happiness Playlist
"The Happiness Playlist" is a memoir with the potential to inspire others to see music as a comfort, a companion, and a healing balm. In The Happiness Playlist: The True Story of Healing My Heart with Feel-Good Music, musician Mark...