“Taut and propulsive.” – The Boston Globe, review of The Playwright’s House.
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News & Review Type: Review
The Boston Globe reviews THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE by Dariel Suarez!
North of Oxford takes a look at A CAMERA OBSCURA (Carl Marcum) and AMERICAN QUASAR (David Campos & Maceo Montoya)
As we continue to live our days through the latest chapter in our ever-unfolding, shared pandemic, and emerge from the darker months toward the light of the summer, two new titles from Red Hen Press arrive, and they are fantastic. These are not necessarily optimistic works of poetry, though they positively invite us to return inward and see the universe reflected within the self. I cannot recommend them enough.
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AMERICAN QUASAR by David Campos reviewed in Rhino Poetry!
David Campos’s second collection, American Quasar, follows a lonely speaker’s dreams, meditations, and prayers to understand life. Campos juxtaposes inhumanity in the modern United States with inhumanity in the nuclear family, ultimately finding solace in space. Art by Maceo Montoya adds both texture and depth, further amplifying the message of human desolation.
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SINGER COME FROM AFAR author, Kim Stafford, interviewed in Oregon ArtsWatch!
After a recent conversation with Kim Stafford, Oregon’s ninth poet laureate, an idea coalesced for me, that the great energy swap—the invisible exchange between sentient creatures that either fuels or depletes us—is really our most valuable currency…
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Dariel Suarez’s New Book THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE reviewed on New Pages!
Set in Havana, Cuba, The Playwright’s House is an expansive yet intimate novel about a young lawyer Serguey and his family when their father Felipe, a notable theater director, is detained by state security, disrupting the mirage of personal ambition and stability that Serguey has worked towards.
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Sadie Hoagland’s novel STRANGE CHILDREN reviewed in Prism Review!
Sadie Hoagland is the author of the novel, Strange Children. Hoagland is a fiction writer from Louisiana with a PhD from the University of Utah in fiction, as well as an MA in Creative Writing from University of California, Davis. Hoagland currently teaches as a professor of creative writing at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Hoagland’s novel follows a group of eight adolescents in their journeys of finding themselves inside and out of their polygamist commune. Battling against the norms of a home where religion is used as a weapon, these strange children have to find their own way in the harsh world.
STRANGE CHILDREN by Sadie Hoagland reviewed in Midwest Book Review!
An emotionally intense and deftly crafted novel by an author with a genuine flair for originality and a particularly effective narrative storytelling style, “Strange Children” is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to community library Contemporary General Fiction collections.
Martha Cooley’s novel BUY ME LOVE reviewed by Vol. 1 Brooklyn!
Martha Cooley’s title for her latest novel is a predicate. A main verb and direct object, to be precise, its three words at once call to mind the subject and more, at least for the many millions with a fondness for the Beatles. The missing words “Money Can’t” function like a ghost limb for Buy Me Love⎯ and I mean for the entire narrative: haunted and hurting, yet also playful and illuminating.
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Cécile Barlier’s A GYPSY’S BOOK OF REVELATION Reviewed by the SF Chronicle!
Though a newcomer to the genre, Bay Area author Cécile Barlier shows a mastery of the form with this visceral and eclectic debut. In stories that span from the harrowing and macabre to the outlandish and amusing, she turns everyday situations into playgrounds for literary experimentation.
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Allison Joseph’s LEXICON reviewed in ON THE SEAWALL!
In a 2019 interview at Lunch Ticket, Allison Joseph said the following about her emotionally abusive father: “Only after his death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language. That’s why so many of the poems in that book are formal—those forms gave me a way to control and confront the ‘character’ of my father as presented in the book … I needed formal tools to achieve that confrontation.” The meticulous quatrains in her poem “Dinner Hour” in Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen, 2019) offer a cooling habitat for such seething sentiments. I mention this for two reasons — first, I’m still hooked on this collection even as her new book, Lexicon, calls for attention, and also, Joseph’s restless search for and reliance on form extends through Lexicon — where the looming figure of the harsh father reappears:
STRANGE CHILDREN by Sadie Hoagland reviewed in Publishers Weekly!
Hoagland’s lyrical but convoluted debut novel (after the collection American Grief in Four Stages) follows the children of Redfield, a polygamist cult living in a remote Southwest commune. After 16-year-old Jeremiah and 12-year-old Emma are caught having sex, Jeremy’s father, Josiah, drives him toward the nearest town, Pine Mesa, and abandons him on the side of the highway, then takes Emma as a wife.
WAVE IF YOU CAN SEE ME reviewed by AS IT OUGHT TO BE magazine!
In “How It Can Happen,” one of the first poems in this fine new collection, the narrator imagines death as Shakespeare’s “other country.” She writes, “I go with you, / but not all the way to your destination. / I wait in a dark house while you are taken / to a secret location. / We knew this could happen.”
The last line is instructive because it hints at a foreshadowing which haunts so many of these poems. In poem-after-poem the narrator is never sure of what’s across the river, but she’s certain it’s bad. A bridge will suddenly give way. Flood waters will rise too quickly. The villagers at the next exit won’t be friendly.
Judy Grahn’s TOUCHING CREATURES, TOUCHING SPIRIT reviewed on EcoLit Books!
The stories and essays of Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit: Living in a Sentient World form a beautiful tapestry of communications across species and consciousness. From grateful dragonflies to fatherless strawberries to companionable stones, poet and activist Judy Grahn details meaningful connections from her own experiences of the sentient world. Throughout her firsthand accounts, she weaves in histories of ecological philosophies and spiritualities including those of North American Indigenous cultures, South India, ancient Europe, and Grahn’s own Scandinavian ancestors who interacted with spirits in rock and water. Both a study and a questioning of consciousness, Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit is a buzzing network of stories that connect with one another in the loving way that Grahn herself connects with the cats, ants, trees, and microbes in their pages.
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GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT by Khalisa Rae reviewed in The Rumpus!
I was new to the seventh grade when Ms. Rossi routinely refused to acknowledge me. Though my hand stabbed the air in response to questions she posed, Ms. Rossi never called my name. “What d’ya think, Hillary?” or “Rebecca, you give it a go!” Each time Ms. Rossi’s eyes roamed over my hovering wicker-brown arm and landed on a white girl’s freckled face, her lesson, reserved for the few Black girls in her “gifted” class, was reaffirmed—keep your hand down and mouth shut.
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DON’T GO CRAZY WITHOUT ME by Deborah A. Lott reviewed in Brevity!
Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir is the story of a young woman’s coming of age and how she separates her own identity from her family’s. She recalls comedic and painful situations from her young childhood to teenage years.
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