Three days ago, March 23, 2013, I set out writing NEARING THE END. I pulled off one paragraph and deleted it. Time wasted, indeed. The book, a collage of my life's circumstances, is meant for Amaya. After I die, my wife, sitting on the balcony of ou...
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Fiction. Music. In HOW HIGH THE MOON a seventeen-year-old Adolf in 1950 Czechoslovakia deals with the growing totalitarian oppression. He loves jazz and Jean Simmons. Nothing he hates more than the Commies who replaced the Nazis after the war. The n...
Poetry. "Karl Gluck's BLUE DWARF is a study in dichotomies. In matter-of fact, mostly uncomplicated but subtly sophisticated straight forward language, Gluck's world is one in which disparities and dissimilar elements quietly coexist—a world in whic...
Poetry. "Larry Mallory's Ned Collection is a TED Talk delivered by Descartes, while being heckled by Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin. Ned is a forensic detective following the trail of what's been left out, what's beneath and outside of. The poems s...
Poetry. Women's Studies, "'It's a fine line between Iggy Pop and Jesus,' and Madigan Somerville takes us on a grand cosmic ride on that fine line between the divine and the sacred. Along that ride, Madigan Somerville never loses her sense of humor a...
Poetry. "The poems in Allen Brafman's WHEREVER I LOOK, I AM NEVER THERE are on fire. There is a violence, a wrenching grief. This is where I am, he said. 'It is music, it is smoke / coming from my mouth.' Or this: 'my voice / no longer words / but t...
Poetry. "What a pleasure to read Eileen Brilliant's wondrous poems; some, clear-eyed riddles from 'the anarchy of dreams,' others helpless to hide the secret self from herself, or from us, her fortunate readers. She wishes to leave her mark, wishes ...
Poetry. "Whether describing a pigeon as 'the soul / of a homeless penny' and a 'smoke-filled dove,' or 'wondering // when the Sinatra stardust will fall,' John Goode creates a reality that sidesteps physical boundaries. If it were possible to reshap...
Fiction. "Set on the Iowa prairie, THE EMILY FABLES is Stephanie Emily Dickinson's homage to a lost world. Dickinson brings all of her powers of compassion, an eye to detail, and her ability to look unflinchingly at suffering and uses them to conjur...
Fiction. Rob Cook's THE CHARNEL HOUSE ON JOYCE KILMER AVENUE presents the reader with an 'I' spectacularly divorced from the human race. Hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, Cook's brilliant prose portrays the jinxed world of a college student making hi...
Fiction. Women's Studies. "MONTE CARLO DAYS & NIGHTS is the story of a love affair laced with fluid motives and an unpredictable balance of power. Reading these tightly locked, impeccably drawn chapters was akin to sitting with an old photo album th...
Literary Nonfiction. The unsparing homecoming of the prodigal daughter to help care for her dying mother. A New York writer is drawn back to the rural Iowa of her youth when her mother's health begins to fail and dementia rears its head. While campe...
Fiction. "What Gessner does best, perhaps, is create microcosms—self-contained worlds in which he has made up the rules and established the action. I'm reminded of a drop of water, which, under van Leeuwenhoek's microscope, turned out to be teeming ...
Poetry. From the beginning of her career, Cherry has written both formal verse and free verse. According to the citation preceding her receipt of the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, "Her poetry is marked by...
Poetry. Finalist for the Julie Suk Award. "LAST WINDOW AT THE PUNK HOTEL is the most recent collection from one of Americas most daring poets. It can be unnerving to read the reality Rob Cook brings to his language, especially when it gets so close ...