A problem with circles is that they can be traps. Acupuncture, yoga, LSD, past-life regressions, pole dancing, psychic surgery, “special tea”: these are just some of the therapies sampled by the titular women’s group in Coco Picard’s debut novel, The Healing Circle. Mother, the book’s central figure, is the only participant who has a real stake in the outcome of these experiments, having cycled in and out of remission from cancer for fifteen years. As she reckons with the specter of death, circles—her friends and family, her recurring physical travails, but also looped layers of intergenerational trauma—suspend her in a dizzying brew of uncertainty and disappointment.
News & Review Type: Review
Coco Picard’s novel THE HEALING CIRCLE reviewed by Anna Searle Jones for Portable Gray Review
E.P. Tuazon’s A PROFESSIONAL LOLA receives a Starred Review from Shelf Awareness!
“E.P. Tuazon’s collection of short stories A Professional Lola is a poignant, sly examination of their diasporic Filipino American community, told through interactions with extended family, intimate friends, adoptive/adaptive cultural clashes, and, of course, delectable food.”
DC Frost’s A PUNISHING BREED Reviewed by Library Journal
Library Journal has a new, exciting review on novel A PUNISHING BREED by DC Frost. Subscribe to Library Journal to read the full review!
Sheila Regan reviews Cheri Johnson’s ANNIKA ROSE for MinnPost!
In Cheri Johnson’s “Annika Rose,” the titular character is just 17-years-old when the novel begins. Annika lives in a trailer with her father where they’ve lived since her mother died when she was young. Her father, Wes, once had plans to build a house for the family, but that never happened, and the two have lived an isolated existence since in Northern Minnesota. Annika is something of an outcast at school, and spends most of her days either helping her father on the farm, or else wandering in the woods.
As an author, Johnson generously lets the reader into Annika’s inner angst, suppressed grief, and a physical desire the young woman doesn’t quite know what to do with. Her world gets turned upside down when a young couple moves into the house on the neighboring property. Jesse, a composer and fiddler from the big city and his seemingly free, spirited young wife, Tina, awaken the main character to new possibilities for being in the world, but their entry into her life also opens her up to painful revelations.
Foreword reviews ANOTHER NORTH by Jennifer Brice
“Written in her middle age, the essays in Jennifer Brice’s memoir Another North cover her perspectives on place, selfhood, and life in general.
Alaska, with its massive scale and minus-fifty-degree winter temperatures, molded and shaped Brice, even after life took her elsewhere—to Hamilton, a small town in upstate New York where she learned about the coldness of not fitting in. Brice struggled to find a community of like-minded people in Hamilton, feeling pervasive discomfort—“a little bit like being on Prozac: the highs are not as high, the lows not as low.”
The full review by Foreword will be available soon!
Eve Hutcherson reviews Gaylord Brewer’s BEFORE THE STORM TAKES IT AWAY for Chapter 16!
Prolific Murfreesboro poet Gaylord Brewer turns his hand to short nonfiction in Before the Storm Takes It Away, his latest from Red Hen Press. While the structure of the 125 pieces here may project Brewer’s voice in a different light, Brewer’s fans and new readers alike will relish the opportunity to walk with the poet on his personal journey through the seasons of the year captured in this collection.
As it happens, the year chronicled in Before the Storm Takes It Away rises to its conclusion during the spring of 2020, amid the early ravages of shock, uncertainty, and grief created by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the publisher describes the collection as “the author’s pandemic book,” categorizing it primarily in that fashion might sell it short by a considerable distance. To leave no doubt about the beauty of the other elements Brewer offers, I’ll devote the space here to them, with an appreciative nod to the chilling authenticity and memories provoked by the pandemic pieces.
For sheer surprise and quirkiness, the pieces on cooking stand alone among the wide subject variety in this chronicle. They may inspire the reader (and indeed, this writer) to hasten to order a copy of Brewer’s earlier The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, and Desire for more of the same. I mean, who isn’t curious, even if mildly repulsed, by a recipe for Blood Loaf? The first ingredient is three cups of blood, suggested sources being duck, rabbit or pig. And then there’s the Goat’s Milk Caramel, this one a hymn to the soul-stirring process as much as the product that results. “This will be an hour of your life, its currency spent as well in this manner as most, better than many. The agency of the task, the transformation to a commodity of pleasure, a gift to be given.” But then the task is done, and “Oh, the rich reward… Forget everything you’ve tasted before.”
ANNIKA ROSE by Cheri Johnson reviewed by Diane Josefowicz on West Trade Review!
Typically resourceful and resilient, Annika Rose Rogers has become stuck. Plunged into painful limbo after her high school graduation, the titular heroine of Cheri Johnson’s debut novel is fast outgrowing life in her father’s house, a narrow trailer in northern Minnesota. In this landscape of “flat green and gold,” there are few humans but many deer and barn cats and innumerable horses; people travel on country roads in trucks and on bikes, and, in one case, “riding a swaybacked Appaloosa.” But there’s more to Annika’s ennui than simple lack of social life. An affecting character study set in an evocative landscape, Annika Rose plumbs the depths of a lonely childhood marked by grief and offers no easy answers to big questions: To what extent should parents lean on children?
Light Poetry Magazine features review of William Trowbridge’s CALL ME FOOL!
William Trowbridge has stopped by the pages of Light before in the guise of Oldguy (Reviews, Summer/Fall 2020). Now he’s back with a collection recounting the exploits of a classic persona, The Fool, traced through world history from Creation to the Not Yet, in Trowbridge’s crafted and crafty style.
A quote from The Fool: His Social and Literary History, by Enid Welsford, sets the stage: “… It is all very well to laugh at the buffeted simpleton: we too are subject to the blows of fate, and of people stronger and wiser than ourselves, in fact we are the silly Clown, the helpless Fool….” With this introduction, the seriousness ends and the sendup of the human predicament begins:
Call Him Mr. Lucky
Fool recalls his demotion from archangel
to something called an archetype after he
was flimflammed by Lucifer and his buddies,
who seemed to have a viable way out of
a place where everyone’s locked in orbit
around The Almighty, who likes his hallelujahs
chorused non-stop, like on a cracked LP.
But making Hell a heaven didn’t fly,
and now he’s on earth, buying Florida
swampland, phony Rolexes, and weekend
ski trips to Uganda…
Subsequent irreverent accounts describe the Fool’s presence in Bible stories, European history, miscellaneous legends, literature, and culture. The poems reveal the well-furnished mind and often slapstick spirit Trowbridge brings to the project. Sample titles: “Robin Fool and His Disconsolate Men;” “In 1823, after Inventing a Flush Toilet, Fool Discovers Penicillin, X-Rays, Plastic, and Super Glue;” and one of my favorites:
LA Times recommends Jennifer Brice’s ANOTHER NORTH among “20 new books you need to read this summer”!
Brice previously chronicled her Alaska youth in “Unlearning to Fly.” In “Another North,” she returns to Fairbanks as a divorced woman longing for a sense of home. The new collection takes readers from her life as a professor in New York’s Leatherstocking Country to her days piloting small planes in the Alaska bush. Brice is a beautiful prose stylist, and her book navigates the turbulence of middle age with a steady — and elegant — hand.
Publishers Weekly features review of Percival Everett’s SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY!
Everett’s formally virtuosic latest collection (after The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke) interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic inquiry and play. These sonnets resist pure logic or narrative, twisting and turning back on themselves to question their progression and temporality, as in such lines as “The thrill of it all, setting sail,/ years away, might as well deliver/ the letters ourselves upon return, icy letters/ soaked with, overwhelmed with blood.” In the first half of the collection, Everett structures his sonnets around the Italian model, seeming to relish the diagrammatic strictness of the 4-4-3-3 line stanza structure even as internal rhyme, caesura, and enjambment challenge the neatness of the form: “Tweedle Dee did what Tweedle did done,/ a dumb thing to do, it was agreed. Build a house/ of straw on Paradise Street for a pretty/ young damsel chanced for to meet.”
Randall Freisinger reviews William Trowbridge’s CALL ME FOOL for The Birmingham Poetry Review!
This review appears in the Spring, 2024 issue, no. 51, pp. 223-7.
To Move Wild Laughter
Near the end Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, the
heroine, Rosaline, tells her suitor Berowne that, to win her hand, his task for a year, is
With all the fierce endeavor of [his] wit, To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.
Berowne, incredulous, replies:
To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony
William Trowbridge has no such doubts about the powers of mirth. With finely stropped wit, this is exactly the goal he sets for himself in Call Me Fool, his latest and profoundly mirth-filled collection.
There may have been a time in poetry circles when readers new to Trowbridge may have thought he was one of the “World’s Best Kept Secret [s],” the title of the book’s closing poem. But certainly not so in recent years, as a steady output of edgy and hilarious books have proven him to be a worthy rival of such comic fixtures as Albert Goldbarth, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, and Billy Collins.
In this follow-up to his well-received 2011 collection Ship of Fool, Trowbridge returns to the archetypal Fool figure, a classic schlemiel, who, with his hapless bumbling, indeed moves us to laughter. In this follow-up, we are provided with another encyclopedic gallop through time, space, and place, from the Biblical creation to the present, from Heaven to Hell and back.
Review continued in the Spring, 2024 issue, no. 51, pp. 223-7.
William Trowbridge’s CALL ME FOOL reviewed by Richard Simpson for Tar River Poetry!
This review appears in vol. 63, no. 1, fall, 2023, pp. 54-6.
FOOLISH VIRTUOSITY
William Trowbridge. Call Me Fool. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2022. $17.95, paper.
William Trowbridge has demonstrated virtuosic invention and a mastery of form and content across eight previous collections and a tonal palette ranging from the piercingly serious to the wildly humorous. In the process he has garnered much applause and many honors.
He is one of this country’s finest poetic realists, bringing superb observational skills to vernacular American life: its unrelenting commercialism, multiform pop culture, and tumultuous speech. He can shiver a reader’s timbers unerringly, as in his unforgettable earlier poems about his father being in combat in World War II or his own work as a teenager in a Cudahy meatpacking plant.
Yet he can turn as unerringly to mythopoeic invention, as he does in Call Me Fool, his taut, electric, deliciously funny new book, where he reveals again a trademark ability to work unflinchingly in front of massive backdrops (the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, etc.), an unwavering humanity, and an ability to puncture cubic miles of vanity and pomposity. In this mode his work can remind one of what Twain and Byron achieved in similar territory, or, for that matter, what Blake explored and realized in his own capacious mythmaking about heaven and hell. These qualities leap freshly from the title of the new volume to its closing words. Trowbridge has written brilliantly about Fool before: see Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011). Let him do it again? Why not just walk out to the mound and hand Satchel Paige another baseball?
In the earlier Ship of Fool the title character was given the first and third sections of a three-part book, so that the interval of the second section, which consisted of more realistic and tonally varied work, set up a kind of interlude which, to a degree, drew temporary attention (beautifully) away from the Fool poems. Now, Call Me Fool has no sectional divisions, and the forty-two poems that follow its introductory proem are third-person ultra-brief narratives about Fool, none reaching two full pages and more than half ending on a single page. Given Trowbridge’s unflagging invention, intensity, and precision, the reader is invited to a feast…
Continued in vol. 63, no. 1, fall, 2023, pp. 54-6.
Poetry Foundation Reviews BLUE ATLAS by Susan Rich
Blue Atlas by Susan Rich takes its title from the Blue Atlas Cedar found in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. As the book’s epigraph explains: “It is the hardiest species and can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.”The tree serves as a metaphor for resilience and resourcefulness in poems that center on a woman’s unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent abortion that has left deep emotional scars. Click the link below to read the full review.
Pioneer Press Celebrates Minnesota Authors, Naming ANNIKA ROSE by Cheri Johnson on Their List
Pioneer Press has names ANNIKA ROSE by Cheri Johnson as one of their three fiction works from Minnesota authors. The full review is in the link below!
The Shore features review of Susan Rich’s BLUE ATLAS!
Susan Rich’s newest collection, Blue Atlas, is a complicated work that artfully blends the personal and the political, avoiding didacticism to create a timely narrative that explores the themes of choice and liberation. Where many poets wax romantic or end up preaching, Rich has instead crafted a speaker who leaves room for reader interpretation and who also asserts herself. Rich adeptly transitions between experimental and structured forms, highlighting the speaker’s evolving and solidifying self-conception. When Rich’s speaker declares, “I’ve always desired a different life than the one I am living,” the reader is compelled to believe her. Yet, this same woman can also assert she is “the proud ‘I’ that does not apologize, / the ‘I’ that no one holds by the throat” (“From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”; “Single, Taken, Not Interested”). Accepting these two contrasting ideas simultaneously is challenging, but Rich makes it feasible. This is the power of Blue Atlas and the genius of the work.
Blue Atlas invites dialogue and asks readers to confront the reality of choice or lack of choice from the initial poems on. Rich’s speaker fearlessly addresses taboo topics, notably naming abortion, and uses universal reverences, particularly through nature imagery, to connect with personal experiences. This approach guides the speaker through trauma toward self-realization, and the reader journeys alongside her. We see this operate effectively on the micro-level throughout the collection, but a prime example comes early in the collection through “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” one of the more experimental poems of the collection. The speaker responds to questions about her experience with abortion, using the language of nature, especially in cultivation (flowers, gardening, etc.), and her personal experience to engage with a subject often shied away from:
1. Do you feel reluctant to talk about the subject of abortion?
In the center of the ceiling a marigold weeps
or perhaps it’s an old chandelier.
Look. Inside there is an otherworldly glow,
shards illuminated in violet-pink
and layers of peeling gold leaf.
Such minds at night unfold.
2. Do you feel guilt or sorrow when discussing your own abortion?
The cabbage is a blue rose,
an alchemical strip show. They scream
when dragged from the earth,
only to find themselves plunged into boiling water.
The narrative unscrolls from cells
of what-ifs and hourglass hopes.