A Sky the Color of Chaos: Based on the True Story of My Haitian Childhood by M.J. Fièvre Beating Windward Press, 2014 $20.00 “Memory is mutable,” M.J. Fièvre writes of her wealthy childhood outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, during the President Duvalier’s regime. While Jessica (the name she goes by in the memoir) and her sister, …
Receipt Poems by Karen Leona Anderson Milkweed Editions, 2016 $16.00 Karen Leona Anderson’s second poetry collection, Receipt, is a reexamination of the daily duties of our modern American culture, particularly regarding feminine expressions of identity and womanhood. Anderson unearths the power behind receipts and recipes, transactions and documentation of the many roles women stretch to fit: …
Much has been said about the importance of the image to the poem. Images function as touchstones in poetry, they help create the landscape of the poem, provide a means by which the reader imagines the world and context of the poem’s thinking. They are the things that embody ideas, as it were, but they …
Radio Silence Poems by Philip Schaefer & Jeff Whitney Black Lawrence Press, 2016 $8.95 Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney’s collaborative effort, Radio Silence, is as much an urgent call to arms against cyber immersion as it is a nostalgic ode to human connectivity and curiosity. The voices of Schaefer and Whitney …
The Benedictines by Rachel May Alleyway Books, 2016 $16.00 Anne James is a thirty-year-old Visiting Artist at Saint Christopher’s, a Benedictine Catholic boarding school in rural Maine. Although she had a Catholic upbringing, Anne can’t relate to the monks who run the school: “They are a mystery, even to the dogs.” She sees their long dark …
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies Salt Publishing, 2014 £9.99 Carys Davies’ second short story collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, is unique and exquisitely human. It dives deep into the lives of not-so-everyday people in very few words, yet capturing the experience entirely. Davies …
Each Vagabond By Name by Margo Orlando Littell University of New Orleans Press, 2016 $15.95 From a distance, it seems the people of Shelk—a sleepy, working-class mountain town—live ordinary lives. They have ordinary jobs, ordinary homes, and ordinary families. In Each Vagabond By Name, the characters are content with the ordinary until it is disrupted …
Karankawa Poems by Iliana Rocha Pitt Poetry Press, 2015 $15.95 The most striking element of Iliana Rocha’s debut poetry collection Karankawa—in addition to its lavish Día de los Muertos-inspired Betty Boop cover by sculptor Michael Brown—is that it perfectly articulates the disorienting strangeness of grief. “I hear you died as beautifully / as a yellow …