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Smoothie Claudine Toutoungi Carcanet Press Ltd, Dec. 1 2017 80 pp; $12.99 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Peter Pegnall It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens, woe betide the over cautious critic…
One hundred pages, six poems. A hand holding a small ball of foil reaches across the center of the cover, finger stretched, insistent or offering.
Fail Better is expansive, moving across great distances to share with readers wholly intimate moments, but it is not a book that could be called timeless. Two poems in particular, “When I Kiss You, A Casket Opens” and “I’ve Watched Myself Die Twice This Week,” compel readers to reckon with specific events, the first one providing a time-stamp: June 12, 2016.
Most of the stories in The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, Chauna Craig’s debut collection, are set in the American West, centered on characters who often identify closely with their geography … And while Craig convincingly portrays a range of characters, her work is particularly striking when she writes about the landscape of motherhood and the special vulnerabilities of being a stepmother, themes that she understands as surely as she does her Montana settings.
This book is a book about heaven. It’s about the collection of human connections and love that make a heaven. In that case, The Spirit Papers is its own little immaculate heaven.
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