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Leaving one’s spouse takes a lot of courage, and in the culture of the 1950s, that was even more the case. In “Sudden Squall” (Connotation Press), Judy Reeves explores a mother making that difficult choice, employing a particular sentence structure to shape the thematic content and reveal her protagonist’s character. Two versions of this structure appear in…
Solar Maximum Sueyeun Juliette Lee Futurepoem, Winter 2015 128 pp, $18 “Perhaps we continue in the wake of a disaster we hardly marked,” runs the last sentence of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s endnotes for Solar Maximum. Or, the last sentence could be the italicized incomplete fragment: “((when the sun disappears” ending the title poem – an…
Naturalism Wendy Xu Brooklyn Arts Press, Nov 15 2015 42 pp, $5 – $15 Buy: pdf | paperback | signed bundle Wendy Xu’s Naturalism opens with a dedication: “To immigrant parents.” That’s one of the most direct statements in the chapbook, and the eleven poems that follow create such a surreal mixture that it’s hard…
Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women is an anthology rooted in a specific time and place. No, that place is not Japan, nor is it the respective eras from which the four poets emerged. The time and place of which I’m thinking is New York City, 2006, the setting in which Poets…
Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life Dawn Lundy Martin Nightboat Books, 2015 Poetry | $15.95 104 pages, 6 x 9 in Buy: Paperback Dawn Lundy Martin’s two previous collections, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (2007) and Discipline (2011), were remarkable both for the rigor of their investigations of identity…
Some narrators announce their unreliability in the opening sentences of a short story (see Matt Sumell’s “All Lateral”), and in this way their skewed vision of the world serves as a stylistic lead, drawing readers in. In “The Know-It-All,” from the latest New Ohio Review, Jeff Spitzer creates a narrator whose reliability is revealed…
We humans as a species have difficulty accepting that our heroes are made of the same plain stuff as the rest of us, which is why it can be so difficult to write a hero story in which the protagonist’s heroic actions appear, well, human. Rolf Yngve’s story, “A Prerogative,” (Kenyon Review March/April 2015)…
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