Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love is Carlos Allende’s Quill Prize-winning novel from Red Hen Press. Readers will embark on a riotous, ribald, and somehow still laughter-inducing ride, from a terrible first date over coffee to a somewhat-accidental-but-also-on-purpose murder, with a few unintended deaths, a lot of misery, and of course, shopping and love to boot. 

“Hell,” wrote Percy Shelley in 1819, “is a city much like London.” A hundred and twenty years later Bertolt Brecht, who fled the Nazis for Santa Monica, volunteered a different perspective. “I,” he wrote, “who live not in London but in Los Angeles/Thinking about Hell, suppose it must be/Even more like Los Angeles.” In Hell, too, there are

            such luxuriant gardens
With flowers, as big as trees, that admittedly perish at once
Unless watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With heaps of fruit that, it must be said
Have neither smell nor taste. And the endless columns of cars
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, gleaming vehicles in which
Rosy people coming from nowhere are going nowhere
And houses, built for the happy and therefore empty
Even when lived in.

(translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine)

HOPE, WHEN HELD past the point of reason, is liable to transform into a certain kind of absurdity. Over the course of The Healing Circle — the latest novel from writer, artist, and curator Coco Picard — a woman and her loved ones walk the narrow line between hope and delusion as she battles cancer.

The Healing Circle follows Ursula, or, as the story’s anonymous narrator calls her, Mother, on her journey to beat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Ursula’s journey is not centered on chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation. With the support of the Goop-esque Healing Circle, a group of affluent California women, Ursula dedicates herself to pursuing alternative healing methods. The list of attempted remedies is endless — Ursula and the Healing Circle look for a cure in urine-dipped celestial charts, yoga, investigations of past lives, and pole-dancing classes. For a while, these endeavors serve as entertaining distractions, but over time, their ineffectiveness proves unbearable. At last, frustrated by the futility of these alternative therapies in improving her condition, Ursula heads to Germany to receive a so-called “miracle cure” that rouses skepticism from her children and unnerves even the most devoted Healing Circle participants. Undeterred, and brimming with quiet desperation and resignation, Ursula makes the trip to Munich.

Northampton author Ellen Meeropol used her first four novels to explore how a range of social and political issues, from the rise of the U.S. security state in the aftermath of 9/11 to the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, played out in the lives of different people.

In her newest book, “The Lost Women of Azalea Court,” Meeropol has drawn on a chapter of local history — the former Northampton State Hospital — as background for a mystery that examines the secrets, lies and painful stories at the heart of a small group of families. The novel, set in Northampton, is also an examination of how society treats the mentally ill and the unpredictable ways in which people can come together.

“Since all around us refugees seem to be fleeing from something, one must ask from what they themselves flee—and that it’s hard to imagine there is anywhere left one can go to find refuge. 

That is the dilemma at the core of Pamela Uschuk’s collection Refugee (Red Hen Press, 2022), a book of poems in four parts that beautifully and heartbreakingly renders a speaker’s quest to find either a safe place in a world deteriorating around her or a place from which to fight against the fall.”

A unique and inherently engaging novel about life, death, and dying, “The Healing Circle” showcases author Coco Picard’s natural flair for crafting a novel of serious substance with a flair for humor in service to the human condition.

Although Marybeth Holleman’s five books are all deeply rooted in Alaska’s landscape and wildlife, Tender Gravity is her first expression of that connection through poetry. The title phrase comes from the first entry, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” in which Holleman (The Heart of the Sound) recalls her childhood when she imagined that flying would be just like swimming: “you stroke/ through air like water.” The bittersweet nature of longing resurfaces throughout, such as when the speaker in “Prodigal,” a poem about birds’ spring arrivals, asks: “Who would I rather be?/ One returning,/ or one staying?”

By Charles Rammelkamp

“we are what happens by accident,” Joshua Rivkin writes in the first “Envoi” of this lyrical, emotionally probing collection, and goes on:

Suitor, from the Latin secutor,

to follow. I can’t

catch them, or let them go —

So much of the poetry in this book is about desire, the Joie de Vivre it provides and the mistakes and tragedies it can cause. Or, as he writes in the second “Envoi” that bookends the collection, meditating on an orange peel “wound over the core of an apple —”:

imperfect as the marriage

of memory and desire.

Our bodies hunger

and can’t remember for what.

Judy Grahn’s Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit is a thought-provoking study of relationships between human and nonhuman creatures and spirits. It collects ten nonfiction essays, divided into three parts, with a vivid record of Grahn’s observations and contemplations of the sentient world, a historical track of her metaformic consciousness, and a personal encounter with creatures and spirits presenting nature and human nature. As Jenny Factor points out in her introduction, this study is “about capturing a world—our whole interconnected, living world—before it has slipped out of our consciousness and into realms beyond our possible reclamation” (p. 11). Its purpose is to raise an awareness of the world that belongs to both human and non-human creatures.

Grahn is a pioneer in metaformic theory. Her essay, “The Emergence of Metaformic Consciousness,” discusses four varieties of metaform. The first one is wilderness, referring to, in Grahn’s words, “the use of, or more accurately, being in relation with, creatures, formations, and elements of nature to describe menstrual ideas” (http://www.metaformia.org/articles/emergence-of-metaformic-consciousness/#_ftn1). What then are Grahn’s menstrual ideas?

“’So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,’ Pamela Uschuk questions in ‘A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,’ challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems of urgency and the hope for meaningful change.” 

Boreal Books, founded and edited by Peggy Shumaker, a former Alaska writer laureate, has since 2008 been publishing exemplary poetry and prose by Alaskans. This summer it’s brought forth two new very different but complementary poetry collections. Emily Wall’s “Breaking into Air” grew out of a project gathering birth stories from parents and others. Marybeth Holleman’s “tender gravity” explores, tenderly, a wide range of life encounters with heart-hurts and solace, especially in the natural world.

“Inside their heads, humans are caught in a civil war between the little gleam of intelligence they want to believe is them and the animal which that spark of intelligence evolved to serve. Most of the time, the animal wins.”

In Carleton Eastlake’s provocative and sharply written Monkey Business (Red Hen Press), William Fox is caught somewhere in between that civil war — as a writer immersed in the corporate, political and social minutiae that defines the entertainment industry and, in this case, the TV series for which he writes, and for the animal-like attraction, obsession and love he possesses for an erotic dancer.

“Set in rural China during the 1970s, Ruyan Meng’s debut novel Only the Cat Knows is told from the point of view of a young factory worker married to a woman who stays home with their three children, two of whom suffer from ramifications of malnutrition. His wife could in theory work, but their sickly children need much attention and there’s no one else to care for them. The narrator’s salary falls short of monthly expenses for medication and food. Under no illusions that life is fair, he nonetheless sees others in his factory receive paychecks with bonuses and raises.”