Elise Paschen's THE NIGHTLIFE received glowing praise from F Newsmagazine's Natasha Mijares. Take a look at what Mijares has to say and then check out Elise's amazing collection!
"The sun seems to be constantly mitigated by water; it becomes a wash rather than a opening. In this logic, it acts in the same nature as nighttime, showing that there is knowledge to be discovered in the “arc” between night and day that Paschen so astutely points to."
Read the full article here.
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Ellen Meeropol sits down with Womens Magazine to discuss her newest novel, mental health and climate change. Listen to her brilliant interview here!
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Poetry Northwest features Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Water & Salt in their new series, Appreciations! Read it here!
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A Foreword Reviews LGBTQ+ Spotlight issue features our very own Gabriel Jesiolowski!
"As Burning Leaves, Gabriel Jesiolowski's debut collection, is an experience in othernesss from a poet experienced in teaching art, writing, and gender studies at the university level, and one who served as the 2016 writer in residence at The Alice Gallery in Seattle."
Jesiolowski has a fine grasp of craft and emotion.
Startling and successful; for most readers.
"Her poetry is always translating something—experiences, cultures, memories—for someone else."
Lena's skill with translation and her new collection of poetry WATER & SALT has been covered in SEATTLE WEEKLY! Read all about the beauty of translating poetry and why Lena is to brilliant at it!
"Tuffaha’s poems are required reading material for any Arab-American literature list, and for all Americans whose knowledge of the Middle East ends at what the media reports."
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's WATER & SALT review by SO TO SPEAK perfectly captures the beauty and the heartache that Lena explores in her poems. See what SO TO SPEAK has to say about this wonderful collection of poetry, and don't forget to pick up your own copy of WATER & SALT today!
Congratulations to Siel Ju on this amazing interview with Fiction Writers Review!
"It?s interesting, because it didn?t really occur to me that my stories were so much about sex until I started getting the blurbs for my book," Ju explains in the interview.
Read the full interview here.
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Of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, Tuffaha offers a beautifully crafted debut that uses clear, observant language to explore the immigrant experience and the burdens of ongoing war. As she explains, We travel back not to// because even now/ after weve lived longer// here than anywhere else// we still think of this place// as new. Writing crucially helps her negotiate that newnessThe hollows of write/ are lined with bookshelves/ and speak spirals off my tongue into storiesas it helps her negotiate reentry into a brutalized homeland. Even as she notes the fragrance of almond blossoms, she observes: Today again. Smoke-charred throats/ suffocating. VERDICT Taking her from Beirut, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and a once-imprisoned Palestinian friend whose eyes are like two pools of olive/ oil about to ignite, Tuffahas journey is both immediately relevant and timelessly poetic.
–Library Journal review
Winner of the Feminist Wires inaugural poetry contest, ford debuts with a fiery collection that uses language both evocatively rich and colloquially sharp and sly to capture the African American experience. Poems titled past life portrait range from the Negroes Burying Ground in Lower Manhattan, circa 1787, to the imagined thoughts of Rodney King, while the ambitious and deftly handled black, brown, and beige (a movement in three parts) echoes Duke Ellingtons symphony of the same name. (Movement Three: Beige says this/ skin a shade/ and a half past alright). Another poem series, how to get over, offers tough-love advice: unload the artillery/ of switch, shrapnel their eyes with/ bitch and fierce, drop dead// gorgeous. VERDICT Drop-dead gorgeous indeed.
-Library Journal starred review
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh praises Verónica Reyes for her collection of poetry.
"Verónica Reyes charges her lines—nearly every single one—with the sharp electricity of her East L.A. tongue. It’s this dance, this lingual limbo, that transports you straight into the streets of her city. Not tethering herself to English alone allows her to draw beauty from both languages, to choose her words twice as thoughtfully."
Click here to read the full review.
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"All good stories turn on conflict, but there is a plethora of discord and tension in ?Kinship of Clover.? At times, it almost overwhelms the story, requiring attentive reading so as not to get lost in the entangling threads of drama."
Read more here.
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CAKE TIME [STARRED REVIEW!]
Author: Siel Ju
Review Issue Date: February 1, 2017
Online Publish Date: January 23, 2017
Publisher:Red Hen Press
Pages: 192
Price ( Paperback ): $15.95
Publication Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN ( Paperback ): 978-1-59709-031-5
Category: Fiction
In Ju's debut novel in stories, a young woman explores the dangerous, voyeuristic, and violent undertones of her sexual encounters.The blistering opening salvo, "How Not to Have an Abortion," traces the narrator's teenage journey to Planned Parenthood and handles reproductive rights with humor, grace, and an unflinching eye for detail. We follow her to college, a "no-name liberal arts school in rural Pennsylvania," then out to Los Angeles, where she encounters a self-absorbed copy editor and a nudist, among other lackluster beaus. As she ages, she grows ever more distant and apathetic about her decisions, most of which revolve around men. At times, the narrator is distressingly disconnected from the other people in her life, from her mother and sister, who share a "dank, cramped walk-up apartment in Koreatown," to her single friend, a sour young woman named Erin. This distance is a product of the ease with which the narrator disassociates, and it's no wonder why. The men that dominate her life tip easily from tenderness to violence, especially in "Easy Target," a complicated, menacing story about rape set at a swingers party in Eagle Rock. Throughout these stories of ugliness and disconnection, Ju has a gift for plucking the exact right phrase out of the air: a date is described as "a decent-looking guy with a conservative haircut, the kind you might see in a Men's Warehouse ad," while a roommate has "a scrim of mousy hair and soft chub." At times uneven, the collection would benefit from more breadth and the sustained energy of its early stories. Like the narrator's frustrated boyfriend in "The Regulars," readers might eventually wonder "Why draw attention to something ugly?" But for Ju, who has a strong, nimble voice, attentionand uglinessis the point. A promising start for a brave and unapologetically bold new writer.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/siel-ju/cake-time/
Barrelhouse says Rozema's essays are "humble, honest, insightful, and, like the best essays on any topic, but especially ones tinged with spirituality, they aren’t too sure about any one thing. They’re spiced with litanies of 'maybe.' Which is, well, a blessing." Click here to read the the full article!
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