Book Review
And the Bride Closed the Door
A dark and comic family drama, Ronit Matalon’s "And the Bride Closed the Door" takes place in Tel Aviv and begins with Margie making a big announcement through her bedroom door: “Not getting married.” The ensuing action takes a few...
Book Review
Klotsvog
Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, a Jewish Ukrainian mathematics teacher born in 1930, comes of age during the Soviet Union’s post-war era of power and becomes an exemplary Russian woman, wife, and mother in every respect. If you believe this,...
Book Review
Last of the Spirit Bears: The Greatest Hits (2014-2019)
Last of the Spirit Bears is a heartfelt anthology of poetry and prose that functions like a scrapbook of a doctor’s experiences. R. R. Pravin’s anthology Last of the Spirit Bears assembles poems from four prior poetry collections,...
Book Review
One Coin Found
Lutheran priest Emmy Kegler’s "One Coin Found" rejects easy notions of Christianity to examine human struggles, identity, and the stories that US Christians tell about who does and doesn’t belong in the bailiwick of God’s love....
Book Review
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt
In Andrea Bobotis’s "The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt", Judith is the keeper “not just of the Kratt family’s valuables but of its stories, too.” The murder of her brother, Quincy, is one story that the family never quite faced....
Book Review
A Singing Wire
A collaboration between photographer Ryan J. Bush and his mother, poet Virginia O. Bush, The Singing Wire pairs their work in order to “peer through the veil of the ordinary into a contemplative, non-verbal, timeless place beyond...
Book Review
The Tiny Journalist
Written to honor youth activists Janna Jihad Ayyad and her cousin Ahed Tamimi, Naomi Shihab Nye’s "The Tiny Journalist" uses poetry to blend stories and speak truth to power about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Amid unfathomable...
Book Review
Burn Fortune
It’s the 1990s, and June is making her way through high school in Marshalltown, Iowa. Life moves at a laconic pace, spiked with the adrenaline of teenage discovery. But in Brandi Homan’s "Burn Fortune", what June discovers about the...