In a recent review, Publishers Weekly had some kind words for An Age of Madness, the new novel by acclaimed writer David Maine:

"In the deftly sketched Regina, Maine has created a touchingly human reminder that scar tissue isn't always visible."

Click here to read the full review.

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In his recent review on The Modern-Day Hitchhiker, Jason Aydelotte says that, "[Fade to Black] has got plenty of action, gore in all the right places without seeming too overblown, and it's so different from any of the other so-called 'zombie books' out there."

For the full review, click here.

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In a recent review in the Sugar House review, Liz Kay had this to say about Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge –

"Throughout the book, we’re treated to Trowbridge’s trademark talents—the fine craft of his poems, his irreverent humor, and his egalitarian mixing of references

in which Milton and Hume share equal footing with Mr. Bubble, classic movies, and hot-rod cars."

To read the full review, click here.

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In the review entitled, 'Robert Sward releases his career collection,' Stephen Kessler acknowledges that Sward is Santa Cruz's "most nationally famous resident poet."

To see the full review, please click here.

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With prose as clean as Hemingway's and a Kafka-esque sense of the absurd, Greg Boyd delivers a memorable book in Modern Love and Other Tall Tales. But these tales are not quite so "tall" as the title might suggest; in fact, their distinction lies in the way they negotiate a fine line between veracity and the farcical.

Each narrator seems to fancy himself "the rational one" while elaborating the most bizarre situation with little or no comment. Boyd exploits this irony by mingling a crushing sense of isolation with a host of eccentric, straight-faced characters whose predicaments become the reader's source of stupefaction and endless mirth. In "Horny," a man walks around town carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, convinced that suffering will erase his primal instincts; "Listen" is a one-sided conversation in which the narrator formulates a sad and defensive logic that falls on dead ears or "as one might imagine" no ears at all; and "The Further Adventures of Tom, Huck, and Jim" transports Twain's classic characters to Southern California and brings us hilariously up to date.

But Modern Love isn't just one laugh after another. Though Boyd makes light of unfortunate circumstances, there is an underlying feeling of loneliness and sadness throughout, as if his characters' idiosyncrasies were born from an acute sense of helplessness or an inability to participate in or relate to typical activities. The characters themselves seem real but flimsy, as if they will at any moment be blown off the page by a Kafkan ill wind, as if they were all once, as in "Unglued," "shy and sickly, largely ignored by the other children."

Boyd's writing, like his characters, is straightforward and descriptive. There's no need for verbal trickery here because the author's imagination provides us with more than enough to digest. In Modern Love it's quite possible to become so engrossed in a story that you forget you're actually reading at all.

Red Hen Press, a small nonprofit press in Los Angeles, continues to expand its poetry list with the publication of Diane Wald’s first full-length collection. (Wald’s chapbook publications include My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press.) The poems in Lucid Suitcase are delicate, sophisticated lyrics that hang together by virtue of their objects and commanding use of color: “I saw you were wearing green / boxy / then dream of the boxy green car”; “The sky / is the color / of a ripe / Concord grape. The road’s / white/ at this hour and / painful.” Wald’s poetic is strikingly visual—and her electronic chapbook inspired by the titles of artworks by Jean Debuffet is featured on the online poetry magazine Mudlark.

Softness of tone and transition distinguish the poems from clunky, academic machinations or heavy, cathartic narration: “Here is the airplane arriving through wind and rain / precisely on time.” Throughout the book’s prose poems and left justified lyrics, words are arranged on the page, not scored according to their music. Wald builds the poems to enable the reader to reproduce her original vision, or slippage: “Her I iron the blue tablecloth. / The red is upstairs.” Symbolic use of vocabulary, dull words (heave, cloud, moon, sea), but doesn’t mean that the poet has been enchanted away from performing her writing job. She writes “I could see / it was just a paper / death.” She translates her observations into lively, memorable poems.

Review by Catherine Daly

"Bradfield [has a] keen eye for intertwining the narrative of the natural world and her human narrative. This is what is breathtaking about Interpretive Work… here are the poems of an important new poet."

"–from Julie Enszer's review in Lambda Literary Report, Spring/Summer 2008

I let out a "hell yeah" for Elizabeth Bradfield's "On Expertise". It's not the vocabulary of most science writing that signals the reader's autonomic system to hit hibernation levels, it's the depersonalization, the lack of imagination. Not a problem for Bradfield: she's got the imagination and empathy, thank goodness. "

–Jordan Davis, host of NYC"'s "Million Poems Show"

In her marvelous debut collection, Elizabeth Bradfield probes the work of daily life, locating her speakers in family, intimate relationship, neighborhood, wilderness, and workplace. A sequence titled "Butch Poems" offers an unforgettable take on lesbian self-presentation, linking it to "Multi-Use Area" and others that explore how we "read" one another in the public sphere…These poems shimmer with asides, original tropes, self-deprecating wit and a scientist"'s passion for accuracy. Interpretive Work signals the arrival of an important new voice among us.

"–Robin Becker, author of Domain of Perfect Affection

more at www.ebradfield.com

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This first full-length collection by Lisa Russ Spear is a mature work, wrought with honed skill and diligent truth telling. Glass Town appropriately begins with “Scenes from Childhood,” a cycle of thirteen poems which allude to Robert Schumann’s piano cycle. The opening poem of the cycle, “Foreign Lands, Foreign People” also alludes to a scene in Jane Eyre. Like Jane, the speaker of this poem “crack[s] the heavy atlas’ spine” to feel both the allure and the weight of the world beyond her sheltered childhood home.

Jane will figure again, in the titular cycle, yet again in the book’s penultimate poem, “Finishing Jane Eyre on the Grounds of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital” after many connections have been forged between her plight and that of modern girls, orphaned by their culture, their families, themselves. Spaar reminds us that Emily Bronte imbued her Jane with “as much soul as you—and full as much heart,” yet the plea of contemporary girls and the women they become to be recognized as fully human is not merely historical. The Red Room, in which Jane was locked to be tamed by her guardian, is employed by our culture in the many diminishing messages that girls in receive. In “Something Important” the girl/speaker recounts that she must separate from her younger siblings vacationing seaside because “One of my mouth was newly red, / and all knew it. And so now I could not swim, / must sit apart.” She tries to bridge from childhood to adulthood by imagining that she can blow her emotion-laden water through the keyhole of her parents’ bedroom, but this, too, is doomed, disabled by the reality of living in a “modern tract house/ [where] there were no keyholes, no privacy, / no ceremony.” And presumably there is no celebration to help her move from girl to woman.

Similarly, the collective speaker of “Recital” fidgets and is told “to hush among the gladioli/presiding over trays of tri-tiered sandwiches.” What these girls must make in there recital is not music by the shared pretense of perfections, as fearful as their parents “that live their lives would be exposed / in one misstruck key, or two, or three…” In “Anorexia” the speaker obsessively explores the connection between the slaughter of animals for food and self-torture.

But another strand runs through these poems: Rapunzal is plotting her escape. She will leave by weaving new hair, by following the spider’s craft after ransoming “the world for my body, / my body for the world.” Even in the suburban landscape of childhood some wilderness can be scouted and preserved, a bit of passion to counteract the stultifying subversions of self that pressure from without and within. In the book’s penultimate poem, the speaker brings herself back from anorexia’s death sentence by recognizing that her willful vanishing act is really its opposite: “in a blaze of disappearing, / a death-wish to be seen–”. Spaar’s poems sweep us from the castle to the edge of the forest in a fresh, compressed language of music and arresting images.

Emerson argued that one’s body belongs to the Not me rather than the Me, and Whitman countered that our identities derive from our bodies. These opposing views define the two poles of Lisa Russ Spaar’s bravely elaborated ambivalence. Like Whitman she makes herself a poet of the soul by also making herself a poet of the body, but like Emerson, or Plotinus before him, she acknowledges estrangement from, as well as a desire to escape altogether, the demands, disappointments, and frankly presented details of her body. In exploring the uneasy features of her vision, this abundantly talented poet most often turns to images of children, fair tales, music, and her own struggles with anorexia. But whatever the images, these memorable poems frequently echo the self-defining protest of Jan Eyre, the patron saint of Glass Town: “I have/ as much soul as you—and full as much heart!” To enter Lisa Russ Spaar’s otherworldly world, a world created not just by the original images she chooses but also by her skillful handling of line, syntax, diction, and sound, is to realize that she probably has much more of both than most of us. High recommended.

A collection of poems that captures the experiences of a Korean American writer living in two worlds — her native Korea, her contemporary America. Neither and both are quite home as she navigates the amorphous state of being in between.

Maurya Simon’s sixth collection of poems, the visionary Ghost Orchid, begins, like Dante’s Commedia, in the middle of life, where we always are. The first section’s title poem, “Between Heaven and Earth,” reminds us that “The freshest beauty commences first / in the eye’s cathedral.” Without our mortal eyesight, “where a blueness / of sky blooms into the brain’s exaltations, / where awe rises and rises in a tide / of embraces and farewells,” there can be no deeper vision, no truer understanding of the larger spaces we can and in fact do inhabit. Changeable weather, tidal surges, the systole and diastole of joy and grief, define us and our place in the world, even as they limn what’s otherwise unknown and unknowable.

But if this book recalls any other texts, it recalls most, both musically and thematically, the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible, especially Psalms and the Song of Solomon. Simon reminds us repeatedly that one singing voice secures for us at every moment an appreciation of divine grace. Indeed, that grace depends on our structures of support. “How does God hold up heaven?” the poet asks in “Black Haloes.” Though we “have fallen five hundred fathoms / Below His grace. . . .it is we / Who balance his scaffolds, who upraise / Our aching arms eternally to bear up / The golden planks and invisible girders.”

The “ghost orchid” then becomes an apt figure for the human voice. This plant, Simon informs us in an endnote, is “a beautiful and curiously leafless epiphyte” that grows by attaching itself to another plant and by drawing sustenance from the air itself. We are each of us just such an inspired “ghost orchid” lodged in the heaven-supporting structure of body and mind. In “The Search,” “love,” the way we flower in the world, is “the only grace binding us / to each other with invisible threads,” like the epiphyte’s tough roots or the rich and playful sonic textures that dress “The Fallen Angel” in her “sequined g-string” as she entertains “the Vietnam vet amputee wringing / his empty sleeve like it’s the enemy’s throat,” or even The Old One himself in “Ode to Beelzebub,” decked out in “Armani garb, and smoking a Cuban cigar, / Sipping cappuccino instead of holy water…”

And of course this love, freely given, must be extended even to oneself. In “An Unkempt Brilliance I Fear But Cannot Name,” the poet is “a child dressed in wonder,” but also “naked, too, under a nightgown / Of clouds, under the shroud” of her own name: “How have I slipped so easily from blame / To reverence, from hurling stray stones, / To blessing my wounds, startling as garnets?” This question has no answer really but the continued testimony of song, which carries us over and over again right up to “this threshold of God-hobbled astonishment.”

The concluding poem, a long rapturous “Benediction” (dedicated to the memory of Allen Ginsberg) blesses “the man with the torturer’s mouth, /. . . the woman with the fossil soul,” indeed all of us fallen and grace-risen by the power of such blessing: “bless them all who are nameless and mad, / oh bless the man, yes, bless the woman.” Ghost Orchid, a graceful blessing from a poet at the height of her powers, deserves appreciative re-reading and joyous gratitude.

Reed Wilson

Poetry International Issue 10

Perhaps there is no present, and existence is built of the alterable past moving into the alterable future, and then through the opaque door of death. Or perhaps there is neither past nor present, as if the person were a ship on a journey through the perpetually mutating future. Kurt Brown?s collection of poetry, and the title poem, "Future Ship," highlight such convolutions of time. Brown is tormented by time. In the title poem he writes, The way out is the way in, and The deeper we move into the future the more we disappear into the past. Aware of the memories that travel with him, unshakable, he writes of family and friends, whole neighborhoods, villages, vast cities, or hunks of them? People haunt him. Like the deceased grandmother in "Grandma?s Rye" who is still demanding Get me my rye! It?s not a warm loaf of bread that she wants.

Brown?s language is informal, inviting, and very intimate. How surprising to read in a poem, There was a guy I knew in college…. Brown shuns formality without in the least diminishing the sense of poetry. An acquaintance serves as the instigator in "White Collar Crime." In the poem the acquaintance goaded him on in the perpetration of a rather violent mugging. It is dangerous to assume that the poem is autobiographical, but difficult not to. Some guilt never goes away. Feeling guilty is proof that you are a good person. So the reader may feel a growing warmth, a certain forgiveness for the human fallibility of the poet.

There is a distinctly feminine quality to Brown?s poems with attention to detail, as in "Who Knows Where," which builds a palpable mood using only the description of a 1948 Christmas tree. At the same time, a strong masculinity asserts itself in the less detailed barroom brawl, or the necessary [or should I say obligatory?] car fetish.

This poetry is intense in the best sense: It is honest, and deeply personal. Thus effortlessly it becomes universal. Most of all, Brown?s poems are characterized by their authenticity. There is no pretense, no weighty poetic device to get in the way of the clarity of what he must tell us. This is a book you will want to keep close by for a long time.

What Poems Say" tells us, All poems say one thing: death is coming? kiss your loved ones, say goodbye.

In a review in San Diego City Beat, Jim Ruland had this to say about Robert Roberge's Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life –

"Slick, brutal and weird, these stories remind us of the violence that lurks at the edges of our awareness. From the sketchy-looking high-desert drifter to the nightmares derived from our own past, Roberge reminds us there's no escape from our desires, and sometimes those who don't survive are the lucky ones."

For the full review, click here.

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In her review in Gently Read Literature, Margaret Rozga had this to say about Peggy Shumaker's Gnawed Bones –

"There is so much more careful observation, music, meditation, and clear, though complex, thinking in the poem of this book than a short review can capture. Peggy Shumaker’s Gnawed Bones is a book to buy, to read and re-read, a book to turn to when in need of a way to access the secrets of the natural world including one’s own life."

To read the full review, click here.

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In a recent review, Library Journal had this to say about Kelly Barth's My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus –

"This charming memoir, Barth's first book, is an exemplary coming-out story as well as a wholesale indictment of the hypocrisy and false promises of many archconservative Christian congregations about sexuality–¬that love, when it happens between two members of the same sex, is a manifestation of broken "machinery in need of parts and service." Barth's recovery from self-loathing and anxiety is a very near thing, but this witty volume leaves her happily partnered and churched. VERDICT A lovely volume for readers who can't get enough Anne Lamott or Mary Karr, Barth's book is both revelatory and amusing."