Reema Rajbanshi’s SUGAR, SMOKE, SONG featured in a review from Publishers Weekly

The nine linked stories in Rajbanshi’s sterling debut collection blend snapshots of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and South America in New York and California, as well as flashing back to experiences in their home countries.

The Vinyl Press features review of Peter Ulrich’s DRUMMING WITH DEAD CAN DANCE

I didn’t really get on to Dead Can Dance until “Into the Labyrinth,” their most popular LP that made the audiophile rounds here in the States. 4AD, their label, wasn’t well distributed in the US when the band was first developing, it wasn’t exactly mainstream stuff here, even in the audiophile community. Yet the band had a following, starting in Australia, where Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had a band and moved to a council flat in London where the two met our narrator, a soon to be jobless publicist for a theatrical/live show venue.

Ulrich had the time, interest, musical background, and chops as a drummer to become part of their band. So we get the story of DCD from the outset of their adventures in England, playing local venues and developing a following. The scene was a sort of post-punk, art-rock experiment in how to juxtapose disparate elements- power pop meets Celtic vocals with exotic African beats.

E.P. Tuazon’s A PROFESSIONAL LOLA on Kirkus Reviews

Brightly evocative, clever, and sincere, Tuazon’s third work of fiction continues to chart a promising path forward.

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Booklist features review of Helen Benedict’s THE GOOD DEED!

MAINCREST MEDIA Book Review of MacLeish Sq.

MacLeish Sq. is a haunting and lyrical novel that blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, present and past; Dennis Must explores the power of memory, guilt, and redemption in the lives of two men who share a dark secret.

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Library Journal features review of Francesca Bell’s poetry collection, WHAT SMALL SOUND!

Following 2019’s multi-award finalist Bright Stain, poet/translator Bell returns with a second collection focusing largely on women and the issues they face (many poems deal with abortion and rape), while also addressing themes like gun violence and highlighting the predominantly white gunmen who commit these crimes.

RHINO Magazine features review of Max Sessner’s WHOEVER DROWNED HERE, translated by Francesca Bell!

Once upon a time many years ago I taught in Germany, not far from the Harz Mountains, haunt of the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Heine. To my surprise my students in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik admired Charles Bukowski above all other American poets. He seemed to be the only English-language poet they enjoyed reading. Which, when I thought about his straightforward narratives, demotic language, and German heritage, made a lot of sense. He was the American Brecht, without the politics. They also liked Hemingway, ease of reading being an important qualifier for transnational popularity.

One feels a similar undertow in Whoever Drowned Here, Francesca Bell’s excellent translation of the German poet Max Sessner. In an interview with Sessner she says, “I found a great number of [contemporary German] poets writing in what seemed to me to be a very vague, abstract sort of style. It’s a style I am not very drawn to, frankly, and it is a style that I despaired of being able to translate well.” Finally, she chose Sessner, after resonating with his straightforward, colloquial style. But there were also similarities in their backgrounds: neither of them has formal literary training nor an academic affiliation. And indeed Bell’s translations are as straightforward, colloquial, and pungent as Sessner’s German.

At times these poems remind me of Charles Simic or Thomas Lux. But Sessner also demonstrates an imaginative freedom I associate with Wyslawa Szymborska. Evidence of a surrealistic bent abounds; the reader encounters dreams, fairy tales, and myth. As Sessner declares in the interview with Bell: “I always imagine that the objects that surround us daily lead a life of their own. Very philosophical, very tolerant. That they would like to understand us exactly as we would like to understand them.”

Bookworm for Kids blog recommends TREE SPIRITS (2nd Edition) by Louise Wannier!

Today’s read… Tree Spirits by Louise Wannier

Today’s read heads into the direction of creativity and imagination. It was presented to me as an unique, nonfiction read…and I’m expecting it to be a beautiful one, too. Using photographs, it should invite young readers to look beyond what they see and let their fantasy weave a slightly new perspective. I’m looking forward to seeing what exciting secrets it holds.

MomReadIt blog recommends Louise Wannier’s TREE SPIRITS (2nd Edition) as a “STEM Books to Explore”!

I’m back with some new books to explore fun STEM concepts. I really miss having a Discovery Club at my library… maybe I’ll use these as a way to gauge some interest again.

Tree Spirits (2nd Ed., Revised), by Louise Wannier/Illustrated by April Tatiana Jackson, (Sept. 2023, True Roses Books), $24.95, ISBN: 9780990997658

Ages 3-8

This book was published in September of last year, but I’ve just seen a copy and wanted to include it here. Incorporating nature and art, Wannier creates fun rhymes that encourage readers to think and wonder at different photos of trees. The repeated questions invite readers to look at each photo, considering the swirls and bumps, shapes and bends of the featured trees. The author offers her point of view, and Jackson, with a turn of the page, offers an overlaid illustration of an animal in the tree. Color photos are crisp, with texture and detail. The rhyming text incorporates different emotions, making this a helpful inclusion in social-emotional collections as well as nature science and STEM/STEAM collections. A nice additional purchase.

Publishers Weekly features review of Helen Benedict’s THE GOOD DEED!

Benedict revisits the terrain of her nonfiction account Map of Hope and Sorrow (with Eyad Awwadawnan) for a complex and heartbreaking story of Syrians living at a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. The plot involves a search for a refugee named Farah and her five-year-old daughter, Dunia, who were separated from fellow refugees Amina, Leila, and Nafisa when the boat carrying mother and child capsized at sea.

Dear Edna Sloane on Kirkus Review

A restless millennial editor seeks connection with a former literary starlet in this epistolary novel.

Read more here.

Katie Lawrence describes that Cheri Johnson’s ANNIKA ROSE both “disturbs and absorbs” in her review for the Library Journal!

“Full of eerie atmospheric writing and many unanswered questions, poet Johnson’s fiction debut both disturbs and absorbs. Annika Rose is 17 and living in the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota with her widower father. Through short vignettes, readers experience Annika’s work on the farm and her awkward relationship with her father. When a new couple, Tina and Jesse move in nearby, Annika’s and her father’s worlds are turned upside down…

Geoff Page reviews latest collection of essays by David Mason, author of PACIFIC LIGHT, for Australian Book Review!

Fluid states of being

Essays on and by David Mason

by Geoff Page

American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage.

A good example of the latter actually appears in the first half of the book in the essay, ‘Beloved Immoralist’, on the novelist Joyce Cary (1888–1957), who is much less well known now than he once was. Mason reintroduces us to Cary by way of his late father, Jim Mason, an Iwo Jima veteran, who, though not particularly literary, was devoted to Gulley Jimson, the memorable hero of Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth.

‘Beloved Immoralist’ is the sort of criticism that Mason does very well, managing somehow to run the lives of his own father, and those of Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson, together in ways that illuminate all three. While not the sort of article that would appear in a scholarly journal, it is a powerful reminder of the role certain key books can play in our lives. A nice evocation of this is Mason’s description of his father’s original copy: ‘One of the few possessions I retain of my life in America is my father’s copy of The Horse’s Mouth. Published in paperback in 1957 by Grosset’s Universal Library, it cost $1.45.’ This kind of particularity is a feature of Mason’s own writing as well of that of the authors he admires throughout the book.

Helen Benedict’s THE GOOD DEED featured in Kirkus Reviews!

Set in 2018, Benedict’s latest follows a group of women who have sought refuge on the Greek island of Samos.

The book begins with the frantic rescue of an infant found at sea by Hilma, an American tourist recuperating from a mysterious trauma suffered at her home in New York. Switching among Hilma’s perspective and the voices of four refugees living in a sprawling, squalid refugee camp, the novel depicts the crises of each woman. Amina is a 19-year-old who has been recently released from one of Bashar al-Assad’s torturous prisons in Syria, haunted by the past and longing for her mother. Leila, a Syrian widow with two young sons, is desperately trying to locate her daughter, Farah, and infant granddaughter, captured by smugglers in Turkey. Nafisa, a Sudanese woman who has endured civil war, gang rape, and the murder of her family, is suffering from increasingly poor health. Reversing Homer’s Odyssey, Benedict illustrates the obstacles each refugee faces in her quest to leave home, capturing the myriad tragedies that have befallen them in frank but empathetic prose.

Ominous But Bright: A Conversation with Jeannine Hall Gailey and Cynthia Hogue

Jeannine Hall Gailey and Cynthia Hogue have always written about embodiment. Their first poetry collections addressed what fairy tales and other inherited stories say about womanhood, and what they erase. By mid-career, each was exploring how chronic illness and disability can shape identity and alter the self’s relationship to the world. Their perspectives and voices, however, differ dramatically. This interview sprang from my desire to put their new books in conversation and see what reverberations might occur.

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