D. Ferrara 10/31/21 D. Ferrara 10/31/21

The Light We Cannot See

Irish-born poet Anne Casey presents us with a study in contrasts in her latest book, The Light We Cannot See (Salmon Poetry 2019). In the pandemic that has locked down Australia for most of the past two years, Casey reflects on the distortions of life as it is. In erudite lyrics, she comments on the present moment, then moves to timeless topics – sometimes in the same poem.

Lily Alvarado 10/15/21 Lily Alvarado 10/15/21

The Day The Sky Broke Open

The Day the Sky Broke Open, by Keith T. Hoerner, is a compelling memoir about a survivor. It focuses on Hoerner as the “target child” of his mother’s emotional and physical abuse. He tells his story through fragmented snippets of nearly 60 years of his life.

Lily Alvarado 10/8/21 Lily Alvarado 10/8/21

Messiahs

Marc Anthony Richardson’s Messiahs focuses on two lovers whose names we never learn, a Black man who was formerly on death row and incarcerated and an East Asian woman who is the mother of a dead child and has been disowned by her family.

Kait Walser 9/2/21 Kait Walser 9/2/21

Fleeing Father

Fleeing Father is a bilingual novel, in English and German, by Romanian-born author Carmen-Francesca Banciu. Narrated by a Romanian girl who comes of age as her country marches toward revolution, this bildungsroman is the first in a trilogy newly translated from German into English by Elena Mancini and Catharine J. Nicely.

Benjamin Schmitt 5/16/21 Benjamin Schmitt 5/16/21

but the flames

Poetry is having a moment in the United States. Perhaps it is the collective search for meaning as we all experience these myriad crises together, but poetic expression feels more relevant now. After Amanda Gorman’s reading at the presidential inauguration, I received a flood of text messages and emails from people excited about the possibilities for American poetry in the twenty-first century. It could be that they are on to something.

Benjamin Schmitt 5/8/21 Benjamin Schmitt 5/8/21

Fires of Heaven

There is often an assumption that people of faith do not struggle with their beliefs, that they have wholeheartedly bought into an ideology to cast away their doubt and blindly assuage their pain. As someone who came upon my own spiritual beliefs rather late in life, I find the opposite to be true. I struggle far more as a believer than I did as an agnostic. In his latest book, Fires of Heaven, James B. Nicola investigates the myriad struggles of the religious life.

Elizabeth Cohen 3/22/21 Elizabeth Cohen 3/22/21

The Invention of Love

I’m thinking about death. I am thinking about love. I am thinking about death and love, intertwining. This is what happens to your brain when you read Sara Schaff’s newest book, The Invention of Love. Opposites attract and mix and slyly become one another in the perspective of the wry and self-effacing narrator of the title story.