Most of the poems in Dexter L. Booth’s second collection, Abracadabra, Sunshine, are addressed to old lovers, friends, and family, and seek understanding amid the emotional complexities of adult life. Booth is a storyteller with elegant metaphors and references to mythology and the natural world, but what is most distinctive about his poetry is the way he juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images and events, while “attempting / to form an argument.”
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“In Viner’s exquisite debut, a Southern California woman raised in a cult struggles to reconnect with a lost love amid a dystopian society…With a wholly original and eerily suspenseful story, Viner has created a modern society that’s just creepy enough to be believable. Fans of Margaret Atwood will eat this up.” — Publishers Weekly
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There is a jagged urgency to award-winning and CantoMundo Fellow Zamor’s sixth book. The opening section, “At the Hand of Other,” consists of 30 one-stanza poems that each lean toward memory and immediacy while the poet seeks balance within a staggering sense of loss. “Poem to America” reads: “oh / society oh; what you cull, piece by piece; what / you strip; what grows back only in time.” Zamora doesn’t mince words in this frank collection of political verse meant to speak for the voiceless.
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A Camera Obscura stands at the crossroads of many such conversations: one could talk about the close, careful pacing of Mr. Marcum’s prose, a storytelling manner that often feels akin to Ted Kooser and Li-Young Lee, were they watching not Nebraska and Pennsylvania but the stars slowly turning above them.
THE TITLE of Judy Grahn’s sixteenth book beckons readers into a world in which all living species share a net of consciousness, a mind as distinct from the brain as a biological organ. The ten essays and “true stories” in the Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit exhibit an openness to phenomena that enables Grahn to explore what she describes as her sensory, cellular, and spirit-related consciousness.
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In Martha Cooley’s novel Buy Me Love, a woman’s lottery win reveals her complicated relationships with money, family, and art.
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In A Camera Obscura, Carl Marcum invites us into the skies with a collection wound around the technical language of astronomy and lived experience on Earth. A poem in sections, “The Hubble Meditations,” based on deep-space images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (as referenced in the collection’s notes), pulls together space, Earth, human history, mythology, and ancestry.
“Taut and propulsive.” – The Boston Globe, review of The Playwright’s House.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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 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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