“A bicycle on which to commute to work. A sewing machine with which to sew new clothes. Eggs, milk, and meat to cure his children of malnutrition. These are a few of the basics the unnamed protagonist of Ruyan Meng’s debut novella Only the Cat Knows wishes he could afford. Yet, he only makes ‘thirty-seven yuan and seventy-five cents’ each month. The amount, imprinted in his mind, haunts him. This inability to afford what his family needs compounded with the fact that he has not received a raise in over a decade form the basis of the novella.”
News & Review Type: Review
ONLY THE CAT KNOWS by Ruyan Meng reviewed in Soapberry Review!
New Criterion reviews THE DISCARDED LIFE by Adam Kirsch!
The Discarded Life: Poems, by Adam Kirsch (Red Hen): “Do details matter?” asks the poet Adam Kirsch in his new collection The Discarded Life—and even if they don’t, the perspicuity of these forty blank-verse poems is nothing short of staggering. Kirsch’s meditations on a childhood in 1980s Los Angeles, by turns wistful and detached, flit between then and now.
Readers’ Favorite calls Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE “a treasure trove of intelligent musings”!
Diane Thiel’s much-awaited anthology of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, is worth the wait. This collection is divided into four parts, each touching on a particular subject or idea that delivers critical but compassionate and witty observations. The first part is titled Questions of Time and Direction and deals with the inevitable march of time and how our rhythms navigate with it. The second part is Notice from Another Dimension, which are meditative perspectives ranging from the politics of sleeping dogs to filtering apps that change reality. The third part is The Farthest Side and addresses the role of time and space in capturing moments in human relationships. The fourth part is Time in the Wilderness, which are flights of fancy with metaphorical undertones that touch on human existence and nature.
Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE Reviewed on The Line Break!
Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy, and Questions from Outer Space (Red Hen Press, 2022) is her third collection of poems. I purchased this book when I was visiting Asheville, North Carolina, and wandering around a bookstore. I liked the title as I assumed it would reveal poems about astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, etc., which are topics I enjoy. I read a few poems, and it appeared my assumptions were correct. When I eventually sat down with the book, I found more interesting topics. Questions from Outer Space has four sections, and each section behaves a bit differently, but all seem to be revolving around the idea of the last lines of the last poem in the book “Time in the Wilderness”:
‘Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE – Poems of Beauty & Anger’ A Review by Joseph Ross
Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just pretty and tasty, puts her in the wide and necessary tradition of American poetry that cannot be silent in the face of human cruelty, America not living up to its own words. Pamela Uschuk’s words, in these poems, share delight at the natural world, at the same time as she laments and “borders on anger” at what we do to one another.
‘Technology and Human Connection’ a Review Of I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS
Yuvi Zalkow’s I Only Cry with Emoticons tells the story of a damaged man trying to finish his novel as he wades through divorce, an unfulfilling work life, and complex relationship dynamics. Taking place in a futuristic society even more dependent on technology than ours today, Zalkow explores how the online world can interfere with (and corrupt) reality. He emphasizes the importance of in-person connection by delving into the narrator’s familial and romantic relationships. The novel encourages its audience to think about their lives and their place in the world by asking “whose story is it exactly?” that a person wants to tell.
Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE reviewed by Colorado State University!
Questions From Outer Space is about coming to terms with humanity’s destructive choices and orienting ourselves to life as a result. Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and caution against how technology separates us from one another—yet the book ultimately presents a message of hope. These poems offer the possibility of solace in the natural world: the opportunity to escape our machine-constrained lives through water, woods, and stars.
the arts fuse reviews Carlos Allende’s COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE!
Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love is a delightful beach read, a lampoon of American culture that provides plenty of suspenseful fun.
Carlos Allende’s COFFEE, SHOPPING, MURDER, LOVE reviewed by Seattle Book Review!
Charlie, who has never found anything he doesn’t like to talk about, and Jignesh, a quiet, overweight East Indian business manager and embezzler, meet through a gay dating site. They don’t have much in common, and it seems they won’t see each other again, but then fate throws them together in ways unimaginable. Jignesh, annoyed by a young office intern who teases him, sits on her until she dies. Needing to ditch the body, he calls Charlie and arranges to buy a freezer he has for sale. With no place to put the freezer, it stays at Charlie’s place. Nosy Charlie sees the body, and when another body appears soon after, Charlie becomes concerned.
Novelist Kate Rounds reviews John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME!
For three decades, the novelist and short story writer John Weir has been spooling out wry, wrenching narratives that ground us in time and place.
Now, Red Hen Press has released Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. These 11 linked stories return us to Weir’s world of gay guys and their girlfriends, gobsmacked by Greenwich Village, and hailing from the tree-named towns of New Jersey.
Yuvi Zalkow’s I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS Reviewed in The Arts Fuse!
Yuvi Zalkow’s novel I Only Cry with Emoticons is a defense of the personal encounter.
As technology has become more advanced, we have become increasingly reliant on communicating via screens. Emojis have replaced words and “likes” substitute for phone calls. While some aspects of electronic modernity are helpful (such as forestalling global collapse during the height of the pandemic), there is still much to be said for good old face-to-face communication.
Eamon Grennan’s PLAINCHANT reviewed by Poetry Foundation!
Set as justified rectangles of text, often comprising a single, elaborate sentence on a page, the poems in Eamon Grennan’s new collection Plainchant (“these plain words—to be taken out at times of need”) appear at first so plainly not plain that a reader may wonder if the book’s title is ironic. Grennan, an Irish poet who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence, remains beautifully “knacky”—artful, cunning—about the miraculous abundance of the world, but his intention here is as “bright and see-through and hard at once” as the window-shaped form of these poems. As with the liturgical music called “plainchant,” he seeks an unaccompanied line, a “hoist of song,” to express the inexpressible: the “pure worldliness” of two horses, the “single thing of wonder” that is a gannet’s flight, a memory of his mother’s “simple solid nearness,” “the day I’m passing through that’s passing right through me.”
THE LOST WOMEN OF AZALEA COURT Receives Glowing Review by Mom Egg Review!
Ellen Meeropol is a fearless writer. When she picks up her pen and follows her characters, she goes to places and situations lesser writers might avoid: a young pregnant woman awaiting trial (House Arrest, 2011); an innocent academic pulled aside by airport security and incarcerated in a secret holding cell (On Hurricane Island, 2015); a young man walking the blurred reality line of man versus nature (Kinship of Clover, 2017); two sisters estranged by political choices and actions (Her Sister’s Tattoo, 2020).
In her latest book, The Lost Women of Azalea Court (September 2022), Meeropol’s characters meet at the intersection of family secrets, unethical institutional practices, and the heritage of political trauma that erupts when an elderly woman goes missing from Azalea Court, a circle of six bungalows on the grounds of a former state mental hospital.
John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME Reviewed In Gay City News!
John Weir’s “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me,” alternately identified as “Short Stories” and “Linked Stories” — 11 in all — is wise, often funny, and poignant yet unsentimental testimony from a narrator named John Weir, whose formative life experiences were his bullying as a youth and the death of “half the people I knew when I was twenty-five” during the worst days of New York’s AIDS epidemic.
Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE gets rave review in Southern Review of Books!
At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word — “a person forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.” However, in Pamela Uschuk’s poetry collection Refugee, readers discover refugees of many kinds, not only refugees who fit the traditional definition but also those who redefine what it means to be a refugee. In Uschuk’s collection, refugees from racism seek shelter and justice in volatile environments, both human and animal refugees seek respite from climate change’s irreversible disasters, and those living with incurable diseases find the courage to continue pursuing a life amid the political, cultural, and environmental chaos each new day spent in astute observation of nature offers.